As the FAZ reports today, T-Online (belonging to D-Telecom) is falling further behind United Internet (Web.de, GMX, 1&1), which has reached a combined 17,9 million Internet users, 3 million more than T-Online. Those numbers are based on the AGOF study published on March 1.

This is quite surprising since T-Online used to be the clear market leader, but they definitely appear to have lost that lead now. Nine months ago they were still ahead. One reason could be that they have not developed community site offerings - including video sharing - fast enough compared with others, and of course they have also been much less aggressive in marketing than e.g. United Internet. To give one example, a partnership with the South Korean community site Cyworld in Germany is still not up and running, even though one could read about it back in October 2006.

Rising steadily are the two private TV channels RTL.de and ProSieben.de, with one million more reaches. This success is based on their video sharing sites MyVideo (RTL) and Clipfish (ProSieben). DSL broadband internet access is now available to 14 million households in Germany, which makes the video download capabilities viable.

Hand in hand with this increase goes the money spent on online marketing, which went up by 60% reaching 900 million EUR in 2006.