Britons Spending 4% More Time Online Per Month
Britons, on average, are spending just 4% more time online a month than they did a year ago, according to new research from Nielsen Online.
The biggest increases in online time were for consumer generated media (47%), search (13%) and entertainment (8%) sites, with the biggest decreases coming for communication (-10%), and content sites (-3%).
| How UK online time is spent by category*: April 2008 | |||||
| Rank | Category* | Total UK minutes (billions) Apr 08 | Total UK minutes (billions) Apr 07 | Change in total minutes | Change in share of minutes |
| All categories | 33.3 | 32.2 | 4% | n/a | |
| 1 | Content | 8.4 | 8.7 | -3% | -7% |
| 2 | Entertainment | 6.8 | 6.3 | 8% | 4% |
| 3 | Communication | 6 | 6.7 | -10% | -14% |
| 4 | Consumer-Generated Media | 4 | 2.7 | 47% | 41% |
| 5 | eCommerce | 2.2 | 2.1 | 4% | 0% |
| 6 | Search | 1.3 | 1.1 | 13% | 9% |
| Source: Nielsen Online, UK NetView, home & work data, including applications, Apr 2007 – Apr 2008. Eg Britons spent 8.4 billion minutes on content sites in Apr 08, 3% less than in Apr 07. Content sites share of all online time has decreased 7% | |||||
| *Custom categories compiled by the UK PR team and don’t necessarily mirror official Nielsen Online categories | |||||
Member communities (social networks and blogging sites) show the biggest increase in total UK minutes over the last year ( up 1.3 billion) followed by online games ( up 0.5 billion).
Instant messaging has had the biggest decrease, at 1.0 billion, followed by sports sites, which were down by 0.2 billion.
Alex Burmaster, internet analyst, Nielsen Online, said: “Consumers aren’t spending significantly more time online than they were a year ago, which means that, if one sector grows, another tends to shrink. As a whole, the communication (including instant messaging which has lost a billion minutes) and content sectors (including portals, ISPs and government), have been the ones to suffer most from the exploding consumer generated media phenomenon.”
Despite losing almost a billion minutes over the last year, MSN/Windows Live Messenger narrowly remains the leading UK site by total minutes ahead of Facebook (both 2.4 billion minutes) – the latter increasing by almost two billion minutes over the last year
“Instant messaging has already seen its mantle as the UK’s most engaging online sector pass to Member Communities and it seems that the dominance of MSN Messenger as the most engaging brand is shortly to be ended by Facebook. This has been a seismic shift in a relatively short space of time and illustrates how social networks have fundamentally altered the way people communicate online. It will be interesting to see what further effects Facebook’s IM application will have on the current players in the space.”
Nielsen Online: www.nielsen-online.com