20
2011
If UK Internet usage was just 1 hour
How do people spend their time online? The Experian Hitwise data allows us to see not only where the UK Internet population are visiting online, but also how long people spend on a given website. Combining this visit data with the average visit session time, we can see the most popular categories by time spent online. In August 2011 there were 3.4 billion hours spent online by the UK Internet population, but if we distilled all usage into a single hour, this is how it would look.
By far the biggest proportion of time spent online is on social media sites. In total there were 800 million hours spend on social sites in August, which translates to 14 minutes of our Internet Hour, almost a quarter of all time spent online. Amongst these, Facebook is still the clear market leader with half of all social networking visits and an average visit time of 22 minutes. Entertainment is the next biggest category, accounting for 9 minutes of our Internet Hour, with the majority of time spent on video on demand sites like BBC iPlayer and 4OD as well as movie and gaming websites.
What’s interesting about this chart is how it differs from Internet visits.
Looking at the top industries by visits share social media and entertainment are very closely matched, but because people spend on average twice as long on social media sites, particularly on Facebook, the rankings are quite different on the Internet Clock.
We will be digging deeper into social media and some of the insights to be gained from online video in this week’s webinar which is this Thursday 22 September at 1pm GMT. On Thursday I will also be speaking at Ad:Tech on the Future of Digital Advertising. I hope to see you there. In the meantime don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for the latest digital data updates.
People are lying about how much they look at porn, I suspect.
The great thing about our data Iain is that it’s not based on a survey asking people what they do online, its actual annonymous data logs from ISPs. So this is an accurate reflection of Internet usage “warts and all” rather than a biased account of what people say they do online.
Social Media isn’t “by far the biggest proportion of time spent online” – that accolade belongs to your “other” category. Presumably things like software updates, academic research,… what else is in there?
The webinar link goes entry form for your social media webinar…where’s the link to online video webinar?
As you know social media account for the most of time spent online, and this possibly is not all that amazing given that partially the UK people is now on Facebook.
Thanks for your comments, keep them coming.
@Waggers – ‘Other’ is indeed the biggest proportion of time spent online but this is an aggregation of all the other categories in our data including things like Food, Gambling, Automotive, Government, Education and Health among others. Social media is the single biggest category online.
@Marc – the link to the webinar is the correct one, the social media webinar will provide context to the social landscape and talk about online video as a part of that.
James
I don’t getthe Clock. In the chart you show Search just below Social – which I can uinderstand – but it is nowhere to be see on the clock. Is that just becasue search isn’t a category in its own right? If so, does it fall within “other”?
Hi Dixon, thanks for the comment. It’s a good point, we didn’t include search in the clock because although it accounts for a lot of visits people typically don’t spend long on search engines. Also as search is really a portal to get to other categories rather than a means in itself for spending time online, we rolled this up into the “other” category.