MediaTel

Only four out of the top ten sites saw a rise in users over the month of April, according to data released by UKOM. Google saw four entries feature in the ten most popular sites, with the brand pulling in a unique audience of 35 million over the month of April, showing just over 1% growth PoP.

There has been little movement in the overall top ten with only one new entry, Google Maps, since UKOM began reporting in January. The mapping service has seen a 1.4% rise PoP, one of only two channels to feature in the top ten.

eBay dropped a place to become the ninth most popular site with a loss of 766 thousand users, but showed a reach of 43% of the UK's online population. The Microsoft brand saw the biggest drop in audience out of the top sites, shedding over a million users, down -5%.  The parent brand saw a dip in popularity many of its channels featured in the top twenty, including Windows Live/Bing, Hotmail and Messenger.

Google Search proved to be the most popular search engine once again, despite posting just a slight increase of 3%.  Google was also the second most popular site overall. Google Image Search saw the biggest jump in audience over the moth of April with a month on month rise of around 6%.  It also moved up one place overall to become the sixteenth most viewed site.

Yahoo! Search pushed past Ask.com to become the third busiest search engine, but lost 5% of its audience over the month with Ask.com down 795 thousand users. Decision engine Bing climbs up one place in the category but remains the 35th most popular site overall, reporting a loss of 76 thousand users PoP.

BBC Search saw the biggest percentage change over the month, after losing 12.3% of its audience. The top ten busiest search engines have remained the same since UKOM began reporting data for January.

The creation of the YouTube Homepage channel puts the Google-owned brand as the top video site and the actual homepage channel in second. YouTube has recently celebrated its fifth birthday by announcing that two billion videos are viewed each day worldwide.

In a month where most sites seemed to be loosing users, two of the main video channels saw a huge spike in traffic. Yahoo! Video and Bing Video saw a PoP change of 103% and 80% respectively, launching them into the eighth and ninth most popular video sites.

MSN Video, which recently relaunched to include shows from Channel 4 and the BBC, saw a 17% jump in its audience, an actual change of 309 thousand users. April also saw ITV Player gain 130 thousand more users, pushing it past Channel 4oD.

While recent figures from UK Online Measurement Company show that the time spent on social networks and blogs between April 2007 and April 2010 has increased by a massive 340%, eight of the ten most popular UK sites in that category saw a decline in users during April.  LinkedIn saw the biggest month on month change, loosing 17% of its audience.

Blogger lost just under 900 thousand users, the biggest actual change.  March saw all of the top ten networking sites grow in audience, while April saw all these sites shed users, with the exception of Facebook and Twitter, which feature minimum growth.

News International's websites theSun.co.uk and Times Online lost users over April when it was announced plans to introduce a new paywall structure.  The BBC Homepage had the largest jump in numbers in April, with 620 thousand extra people viewing the site, keeping both BBC channels as the most popular source of online news.

Guardian.co.uk witnessed a 10% MoM rise, meanwhile, helping the Telegraph (with a slight change of 0.1%) move past into the fifth most popular news website for April. While it was a bad month for Trinity Mirror Nationals, which slipped out of the top ten, there was good news for yet another Google channel, Google News, which jumped into eighth place and reported a healthy PoP rise of 13.8%.