UKOM, the UK Online Measurement organisation, has compiled its figures for the Internet usage of Britons for the month of April 2010, comparing it to April 2007.
And the headline news is that Brits now spend 65% more time online. A total of 884 million hours, in fact, as opposed to 536 million hours three years ago.
The time spent on various different online activities has also changed considerably in this interval.
Of course, the most notable shift is the use of social networks and blogs, unsurprisingly given the explosion in popularity of blogging and sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In 2007 this sector accounted for 9% of UK net time, a figure which has increased massively to 23%.
Following social networking, the next most time is spent emailing, and online gaming, both of which stand at 7%.
The time racked up by folks instant messaging has taken a severe blow due to the increase in popularity of social networking, suffering a drop from 14% to just 5%.
The amount of people emailing, however, has remained constant despite people communicating on the likes of Facebook.
A spokesman for the UKOM said: “Despite the large increase in the amount of time people spend online and the increasing proliferation of websites and online services, one thing has remained constant and that is the bulk of time accounted for by communicating, networking and playing games. These are the pillars on which the Internet as a heavily used medium are built.”
UKOM’s figures also point to the use of the web for adult content being the lowest category at just 2.7% – behind looking at online news websites which clocked up 2.8% of net time.
This, apparently, dispels the great Internet myth that all people do is look at pornography on it.
Either that, or it proves people won’t admit to looking at naughty pictures quite as readily as the BBC News site. We wonder which.
