22 billion minutes spent on Google sites in one month

Google sites were the most visited websites across laptop/desktop and mobile in March 2014, with 47 million monthly visitors racking up 22 billion minutes of browsing time.

According to Ofcom’s latest Communications Market Report, users visiting Google sites spent an average of 8 hours a month browsing, with 13 billion minutes of the total figure accountable to time spent on YouTube, which has increased its audience by over 5 million year on year to 40 million.

Elsewhere on the web, Facebook remains the most popular social networking site with a unique audience of 35.1 million, up 6.4% since March 2013, with mobile visitors increasing 11% year on year from 19 million to 21.1 million.

The report found that Twitter users are most likely to access the service through an app (76%) and least likely through a mobile browser (54%).

eBay overtook Amazon as the most popular retail website in March 2014, with 27.3 million and 29.9 million visitors, respectively.

While laptop/desktop audiences for the most popular news websites are declining, online news was found to be increasingly accessed on mobile handsets, with the most popular news provider, the BBC, attracting 14.5 million users in April 2014.

Overall, a fifth of mobile internet users currently access news on their handset every day.