Nielsen Tells Us How We Spend Our Time Online

A couple of months ago, we talked about a report that divvied up our time online and gave us a basic understanding of where it’s all spent. Well, there’s a new take on this same question, and this time it’s from one of the most reputable sources around: Nielsen. The firm best known for measuring the success of television shows has given us a little bit of info, but a lot of insight.

According to the company’s report, the amount of time people spend on social networking sites and blogs has risen to 22.7%, up from 15.8% in 2009… a staggering 43% increase. Staggering as it may be, though, it’s not exactly all too surprising. Likely thanks to that increase, time spent handling e-mail has gone down, to 8.3% from 11.5%. It seems that more and more prefer the e-mail like services on these networking sites in lieu of actual e-mail.

For the rest of the statistics, there’s nothing quite as stark, although instant messaging has seen a decrease, again due to social networking I’m sure, while movie-viewing has gone up about 12%. The ambiguous “Other” category sits at 34.3% and represents things that don’t quite fit into the most popular categorizations. It probably also includes pornography… something Nielsen seems to have ignored.

Broken down into actual minutes, based off of the figures the company came up with, for every hour spent online, 13m 36s would be dedicated to social networking, 6m 6s would be used for gaming, and 20m 36s would be spent for “Other” activities, which is comprised of 74 other minor categories.

It’s clear that social networking isn’t going away anytime soon, and I’d be surprised if we didn’t see another 43% boost in time spent on it in the next report. I recently blocked myself from even accessing Facebook, just because I found it was wasting too much of my time. It’s certainly an addicting thing, it goes without saying.

Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released today from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.