Europe’s digital year, reviewed by comScore

comScore released “2010 Europe Digital Year in Review”, a report showcasing the digital landscape in Europe in 2010 and the trends for 2011.

This is the 1st edition of the report and presents data regarding European digital media landscape, including market-level data on user demographics, social networking, online video, mobile, and search in 18 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and United Kingdom)

Europe is currently the world’s second largest digital market behind Asia Pacific and Europeans continue to embrace new online and mobile offerings. The key to tapping into this region is to understand the behaviour and individual market dynamics that contribute to it.

Europe’s digital market is poised to keep expanding in 2011, and understanding where the growth occurs in a region as vast as this will be crucial for marketers looking to drive their business among Europe’s diversified markets.

Wolf Allisat, comScore EVP for International Markets

In 2010, Europe saw growth in several key areas as a result of technology adoption across markets and game-changing developments in the digital world: expansion of social networking platforms, strong growth of smartphones and mobile media usage, innovations in e-commerce, and rollout of new devices tailored for connected media consumption.

Netherlands and UK were the most digitally engaged, with users spending 25% more time online / month than the European average of 24.3 hours.

Europeans spent the most time on search, social networking, and directory sites, with Facebook garnering the largest share of Europeans’ time (11.7 percent) out of all media properties.

Europe experienced a 10.9 percentage gain in social networking penetration over 2010 – the highest seen in any global region. Facebook was the leading social networking sites in 15 out of the 18 markets.

The use of online coupon sites in Europe grew by 162% in 2010, showing coupon sites emerging as a key driver of online consumer behavior, with France, UK and Italy leading the local local markets.

The online video viewers number in Europe maintained steady, but the number of those watching TV sites grew.

Smartphone penetration in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy grew in 2010, reaching 31.1 percent of mobile users. There were also huge rates of adoption for Google and Apple smartphone operating systems, with Google Android experiencing a 951% gain and Apple – 115%.

The report is available here.