Google, Microsoft sites on France's "favorites" list

Shopping websites are becoming more popular in France, but still the big draws continue to be Google, Microsoft and France telecom sites according to new research from comScore.

by Kristina Knight

comScore World Metrix studied the traffic to websites in December and found that Google (16.8 million), Microsoft (15.7 million) and France Telecom (13.6 million) were the top three favorite sites for French visitors. Rounding out the top five were Iliad/Free.fr sites (12 million) and Yahoo (10.7 million).

The most interesting finding is that none of these sites posted large gains. Google's visitorship increased by about 3% while Iliad sites posted a loss of 2%; all of the top gainers for December traffic posted increases of at least 20%.

The top gainers were all shopping sites, understandable since December is peak shopping time. Dromadiare posted the largest gain (1.7 million increase), followed closely by CityVOX.fr (1.5 million increase) and Shopzilla (1.9 million increase). Dromadiare is an online card store and Shopzilla a comparison shopping hub while CityVOX offers travel and weather information.

Also among the top gainers were MeteoFrance (2.2 million increase), Karstadt-Quelle (2 million increase) and Apple Computer (3.8 million increase).

The numbers do indicate a turn toward online shopping. Online stores broke several records during the 2006 holiday shopping season, indicating that more users are comfortable giving their personal information to trusted online sources.