It is not only because the month is smaller but in February the number of Internet users who accessed pages of online information dropped, as well as the number of pages viewed and the time spent on their consultation. The data are from Marktest, which found a drop of 7% compared to January and 15.3% when compared to the month of February 2008.
Altogether there were 1,718 thousand Portuguese who accessed websites of newspapers, magazines and information online from home, an average of 381 thousand unique users per day. The number of pages visited was 96 million, a drop of 13.4% compared to January and 14.6% compared to the same period last year.
The drop was greatest in the total time spent browsing news sites, which totaled 1.4 million hours, losing 19.8% in relation to January. Each Internet user will have devoted an average of 47 minutes to these news sites, eight minutes less than in January.
Leading the most viewed information sites is the newspaper A Bola, with 498 thousand unique users, followed by Notícias Sapo, with 486 thousand users.
The website of the Ocasião newspaper was the one that grew the most this month in unique users and Diário Económico led the growth in pages visited, growing 50.4%, which may reflect the interest of users in the new website launched in January.
The analysis is based on information from Netpanel and Marktest warns that these results already consider the new dimension for the study universe, so the absolute values are not comparable with previous analyzes already published on this subject.
