The portal wars within the UK are heating up, as CoStar-owned portal OnTheMarket (OTM) fights accusations of utilizing “misleading” site visitors knowledge to dethrone competitor Zoopla because the second-most trafficked house search website in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Eire.
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The portal wars within the UK are heating up, as CoStar-owned portal OnTheMarket (OTM) fights accusations of utilizing “misleading” site visitors knowledge to dethrone competitor Zoopla because the second-most trafficked house search website in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Eire.
A Zoopla spokesperson spoke to worldwide proptech website On-line Marketplaces on Monday with allegations that OnTheMarket used “low-quality display advertising” to spice up its web site site visitors to 56 million guests in September and mislead shoppers into believing OTM had organically surpassed Zoopla, which had 47 million guests throughout the identical interval.
“While we typically avoid engaging in public debates, we believe it’s important to share the facts so you can better understand the claims and tactics being deployed to ‘Win your appreciation,’” Zoopla mentioned in a written assertion.
Zoopla mentioned OTM’s September site visitors spike is finally a blip on the radar, as Zoopla has outperformed OTM each different month of the yr. The portal additionally cited knowledge from third-party site visitors evaluation website Similarweb that famous OTM’s customer period and web page views per go to declined 9.8 % and 20.8 %, respectively, in September regardless of a 209 % increase in paid site visitors.
“OTM’s strategy seems to be focused on increasing traffic numbers rather than engaging serious movers,” Zoopla added.
In the meantime, OTM was unfazed by Zoopla’s claims and reasserted its newfound place within the UK portal area.
“We are grateful to Zoopla for highlighting that more people visited OnTheMarket than their site,” an OTM spokesperson mentioned in a written assertion. “Since CoStar Group’s acquisition, we’ve been clear about our goal to become the UK’s market-leading portal.”
“Our rapid rate of growth shows that we are delivering on CoStar Group’s long-standing strategy of partnering with its customers to generate high-intent leads at a fraction of the cost of our rivals,” they added. “The facts are clear that throughout 2024 we have seen a huge increase in leads, time spent on the site, and overall traffic, exceeding Zoopla’s in September.”
The burgeoning rivalry between OTM and Zoopla mirrors the continuing row between CoStar-owned Houses.com and Transfer-owned Realtor.com, which have spent a lot of the previous yr tussling over claims of deceptive site visitors metrics, misleading promoting and theft of commerce secrets and techniques.
In October 2023, CoStar drew warmth for saying that Houses.com had achieved 117 % distinctive customer development from August (46.3 million) to September (100 million) — apparently vaulting the positioning forward of Realtor.com because the second-most trafficked portal within the U.S. Nonetheless, Houses.com’s opponents shortly raised points with CoStar’s reporting strategies, site visitors monitoring instruments and different methods to spice up efficiency, corresponding to an aggressive paid site visitors technique.
“It’s difficult to understand the consistency of their calculations,” a Realtor.com spokesperson instructed Inman in a 2023 deep-dive on portal site visitors.
The site visitors battle advanced into 2024, with Houses.com’s site visitors efficiency serving as the idea for Transfer’s Nationwide Promoting Division problem and theft of commerce secrets and techniques lawsuit in opposition to CoStar. The NAD problem led CoStar to regulate its promoting to give attention to Houses.com’s singular site visitors metrics over Houses.com Community site visitors efficiency, whereas the theft of commerce secrets and techniques go well with is on observe for an August 2025 jury trial.
