Traditional names sneak back into UK’s top online brands

Winners, Losers and the Top 50 chart

With new entries bursting into the Top 50, there is little surprise that other brands have been ousted from the top 50 list and the most casualties have come from telecoms and internet services, which in 2004 accounted for 11 of the top 50 brands including Tiscali, NTL and Blueyonder.

Following the demise of early ISPs and large media moguls like Sky and Virgin getting in on the act, there are just 3 Telco's brands in the list: BT, Orange and Skype.

The tech sector has lost 5 brands from the top 50, Travel has lost 4 including Lastminute and EasyJet, while Finance has seen 3 brands disappear from the list: Egg, Barclays and Halifax.

Interestingly while the lower part of the list has been quite turbulent, the top 10 places have remained largely stable, according to the study and 7 brands: MSN, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, BBC, eBay and Amazon have all kept their top 10 status every January.  They have since been joined by YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook.

Facebook, with its 500m members only debuted in the top 50 brands in 2008 but is now the UK's third most popular web brand, with more than 26 million unique UK visitors.

Google has perhaps unsurprisingly taken the top spot since 2006 and now attracts more than 35 million unique UK visitors every month, according to the study. In case you were wondering, MSN was number 1 back in 2004, with around 17 million monthly visitors, a number which would barely make the top 10 today, demonstrating the huge growth in online traffic.

Without further ado, here is the complete chart.

Top 50 web brands by unique UK visitors in Jan 2004 and Jan 2011

Source: UKOM/Nielsen