Time spent on social networking has been climbing so steadily that social networks are on track sometime this year to eclipse what has long been the dominant category of sites on the Internet-portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL.
That is a key finding in a report from Web measurement firm comScore Inc. The researchers found that social networking sites have grown so popular they are now neck and neck with the Web's biggest sites, the portals, for total time spent online. Soon social networks will likely overtake the portals as people's primary home on the Web, the report suggests.
Social Networks Claim 16.6% of Time Online
The report, titled "2012 U.S. digital Future in Focus," is based on extensive analysis of 2011 data from one of the Web's top two traffic measurement firms.It found that portals like Yahoo and its rivals collectively claimed 16.7 percent of all time spent online in December 2011, at least in the United States. That was only slightly more than the 16.6 percent of total time devoted to social networking sites, comScore reported. While the older, more established portals still have a lot more visitors than social networks, their visitors don't spend nearly as much time doing stuff on their sites as people do on the younger social networks.
Most of the social networking time is driven by Facebook, which claimed a whopping 14.6 percent of the total time that Americans spent online in December 2011.
Time Spent On Social Networking Eclipsing Mainstays Like Personals, Weather
People spent considerably more time social networking on Facebook than doing anything on sites owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, the Web's three most heavily trafficked properties. The report said that all of Google's sites, including the wildly popular YouTube, ranked second for time spent, claiming 10.8 percent of the total hours Americans devoted to online activities in December. Yahoo's sites came in a distant third, claiming 8.6 percent of total time online.
Other online activities saw dramatic declines in total time spent during 2011, suggesting a major shift is under way in what we are doing online.
Instant messaging plummeted 40 percent from December 2010 to December 2011, online personals fell 26 percent, weather dropped 23 percent and job searching fell 21 percent, comScore reported. Use of Web-based email also declined last year.
Some of the declines were due to more people using their mobile phones for the same activities, like checking the weather. But some likely is due to the increased amounts of time people are spending chatting, messaging, posting updates and doing various kinds of virtual preening on Facebook.
It's not yet clear, however, exactly how much of the shift in behavior online is directly related to social networking, especially since the rise of smart phones and tablet apps is making tracking online activities trickier.
But social networks clearly are taking a disproportionate amount of people's time online compared to other web activities.
Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+
The Also-Rans in Time Spent Social Networking
In December 2011, one out of every six minutes that Americans spent online were devoted to using a social network, with Facebook, of course, staking claim to the vast majority of those minutes, according to comScore. Facebook also led with total monthly visitors--162.4 Americans in December, or 3 out of 4 U.S. Internet users.
The line-up after Facebook based on number of visitors:
- Twitter climbed through the ranks to take the Number 2 spot, with 37.5 million monthly users--not even close to Facebook's audience.
- LinkedIn claimed the No. 3 social networking spot, with 33.5 million visitors
- MySpace ranked No. 4 with 24 million
- Google+, which only launched in June, ended the year at No. 5, with 20.7 million visitors.
- Tumblr landed a distant No. 6 with 18.8 million visitors.
Facebook Users Spend 423 Minutes Facebooking Each Month
While Facebook's growth rate in unique monthly visitors slowed considerably last year as it matured, its growth in time spent continued to climb sharply. Total time spent each month on Facebook jumped 32 percent in 2011, to a little over seven hours (or 423 minutes) on average for each user, comScore reported.
Google+, by contrast, only got 5 minutes of monthly time from each user, which suggests people aren't anywhere near as engaged with Google's fledgling network as they are with Facebook.
Up and Comers: Pinterest and Tumblr
Only two other social networks claimed more than half an hour of time per month from users, and both are up-and-coming, fast-growing services. People using microblogging site Tumblr spent 151 minutes on average.
Users of the visual bookmarking social network Pinterest spent 80 minutes a month sharing photos. The invite-only Pinterest was one of the Web's fastest growing sites in December; this article explains how to get a Pinterest invite.
