Brits want familiar brands online (or American net giants)

News that UK bricks-and-mortar companies are finally getting their online act together is to be welcomed.

Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show 17 of the top 20 clicks and mortar sites used by British surfers relate to UK brands.

Although Microsoft still takes top spot, the figures show that for the most part, users are loyal to their roots and prefer to stick with UK firms.

Brands such as the BBC, BT and high-street banks from Barclays to LloydsTSB are all now proving their offline visibility counts for something on the web.

As more and more users of the internet are not early, but medium or even late web adopters, traditional brands finally start to flourish.

E-tailer Tesco.com has done particularly well, growing from nothing to be the most popular ecommerce site in the UK bar Amazon.com. Furthermore, it is - by revenues - the most popular online grocer in the world.

The swing towards clicks-and-mortar players and away from pureplay dot-coms is one the analysts have been mooting for some time. Now finally there is hard evidence it is actually happening.

And it seems that when people use old economy companies to provide their new world experience, they go back to the same (UK) brands they were using before the birth of the web.

This means fears of the growth of the internet exacerbating US economic dominance by eroding traditional UK firms' market share are largely unfounded.

However, we shouldn't be complacent. Drill down into the figures and - despite the shift - the majority of the most popular sites are still pureplay dot-coms, mostly ISPs. And the majority of these are US-based.

Indeed, only 18 out of the top 50 websites visited by UK netizens are UK firms. That triumvirate of web power - AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! - stills rule the roost.

So while we should warmly welcome back the high street into our lives via the internet, these firms cannot afford to rest on their laurels. US dot-coms are still effectively unrivalled by their British equivalents.

With ebusiness really taking off in the UK, then these companies - the UK dot-coms such as Freeserve and lastminute.com - really have to do better.