How Does Your Audience Spend Their Time Online?
22 May 2012 by Meredith Mobley
When people aren’t hard at work or spending time with their families, what exactly are they doing? According to a recent infographic from GO-Gulf.com, 30 percent of the world’s population is spending their spare time online.
Thirty percent of the world’s population doesn’t seem like a huge number…but it is. Thirty percent actually represents 2,095,006,005 people who are spending 35 billion (yes, billion) hours online each month. To put things in perspective, 35 billion hours per month is equivalent to 3,995,444 years. How are these hours spent online? The breakdown is below:
- 22% of time is spent on social networking sites
- 21% of time is spent conducting online searches
- 20% of time is spent reading content
- 19% of time is spent on email and communication
- 13% of time is spent on multi-media sites
- 5% of time is spent doing online shopping
Although the study shows that most online users visit Google more than any other site, most of their time online is spent on the social media giant Facebook. Facebook receives nearly 138,000,000 unique visitors per month. These visitors are spending almost 8 hours a month on the site. Imagine spending an entire workday on Facebook?!? Although that idea might not sound so farfetched for some!
Facebook isn’t the only site bringing in the online visitors; YouTube videos receive a total of 4 billion videos a day and more than 60 hours of video content gets uploaded every minute. With more than 250 million tweets sent per day, Twitter is keeping online users engaged as well.
So what’s next?
According to GO-Gulf.com’s study, the future of online engagement will be found in location based services, timeshift TV (think DVRing) and Internet banking.
How do you spend your time online?
Follow Meredith on Twitter at @MeredithMobley. Follow Arketi on Twitter @Arketi.
