It's a no-brainer that registered users at portal sites like Yahoo are more likely to hang around than users who don't register for free e-mail, personalized news and other Web services. But even Net Ratings senior Internet analyst Peggy O'Neill was surprised at what she discovered while measuring portal loyalty: Registered users spend around three times more time at their preferred portal than non-registered users, and visit three to six times as many pages.
At Yahoo, registered users spent 30 percent of their Internet time within the portal in April, compared to 9.6 percent for unregistered users. At Netscape, registered users spent nearly 14 percent of their total surfing time at that site, whereas non-registered users averaged only 4 percent. What does this mean for Web surfers? Well, we can expect portals to become more and more inventive -- and aggressive -- in trying to get us to register.
Registered users, in advertisers' eyes, will be seen as the cream of the crop. If you're willing to slog through registration forms and then spend another half an hour inputting your address book into a free e-mail account or your stocks into an online portfolio tracker, then you're probably living online, says O'Neill. At the very least, you're more likely to shop online than the average Web-head. And that makes you the kind of surfer advertisers are after.
The portal loyalty study also suggests that people who register at one portal aren't likely to spend too much time visiting the competition. About a third of those registered users who spent 30 percent of their time on Yahoo in April also visited MSN, Excite and Go, but they spent less than 5 percent of their total surfing time at those three other portals combined. In other words, registered users are also disinclined to stray.
NetRatings says this data adds up to one important idea: Advertisers would be wise to look further afield than page views and audience reach numbers when they decide where to put their bucks. "Registered users and time metrics," says the NetRatings report, "are better indicators of a site's ability to build relationships with its user base."
