Digital and Zoopla both stake claim to second place

Both Zoopla and the Digital Property Group are claiming to be the number two property portal in the UK.

Digital – owned by the Daily Mail and publishers of FindaProperty and Primelocation – said it was the “clear number two” and cited data from comScore.

Not to be outdone, Zoopla fired off a press release headed “Zoopla.co.uk now UK’s second most popular property website”.
 
The data quoted by Digital, for the month of December, based on unique visitors, found that 2.9m people visited TDPG portals – 1.3m more than its nearest competitor portal, Zoopla.

Digital said that the total of 2.04m monthly visitors “dwarfed” that of Zoopla which registered 1.64m visits.  

Sheraz Dar, acting group marketing director at Digital, said: “We pride ourselves on our status as a challenger brand and TDPG’s position as number two in the market is an important part of this. We offer property hunters the chance to look at around three-quarters of a million properties at any one time and it’s clear that demand for our sites remains strong amongst home searchers.

“In January 2011 we broke all-time records for traffic in our FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com portals, which is testament to the popularity of these brands.

“ComScore’s data is considered to be the most robust and trustworthy monitor of web traffic in the industry, so for them to rank us consistently as the second biggest player in the market is crucial validation. A glance at Hitwise and Nielsen data confirms The Digital Property Group as a clear number two and growing.”

However, Zoopla cited a different auditor, Experian Hitwise, and said that it is now the second most popular property portal.

According to the Experian Hitwise rankings, Zoopla had 1,034,000 unique visitors in December and came second behind Rightmove.

But Experian Hitwise did not rank Digital as one property portal. Instead, it said FindaProperty was in third place with 852,000 unique visitors and Primelocation in fourth with 656,000.

Add the two together, and between them, they have more unique visitors than Zoopla – but nowhere near the 1.3m more that comScore said for December.

Meanwhile, the very newest figures,  comScore’s  for January, shows massive rises in traffic to all the top portals.

Rightmove leads, with 4.398m traffic, up from 2.990m in December. The two Digital portals between them had 3.257m visits (FindaProperty 2,404m and Primelocation 1,115m),  whilst Zoopla scored 1.948m. All of which seems to bear out that Digital is indeed the second most popular site behind Rightmove.

In terms of percentage, though, it is a different story. Month on month, Rightmove increased its traffic by 47%, and Digital by around 65%. But Zoopla increased its traffic by 102%.

Well, we reckon that makes Zoopla first (better than claimed), Digital second (just as claimed) and poor old Rightmove third.

Statistics, eh?