Posted: 19th May, 2010 By: MarkJ

The
UK Online Measurement (UKOM) company has revealed that broadband internet users in Britain spend 22 hours and 15 minutes surfing the net each month, which equates to a 65% increase on three years ago. Social networking and blogs take up the lion's share of time spent online (22.7%), although surprisingly email is now more popular (7.2%) than it was three years ago (6.5%).
Time Spent Online
1. Social networks/blogs - 22.7%
2. E-mail - 7.2%
3. Games - 6.9%
4. Instant Messaging - 4.9%
5. Classified/Auctions - 4.7%
6. Portals - 4%
7. Search - 4%
8. Software info/products - 3.4%
9. News - 2.8%
10. Adult - 2.7%
Many people had expected email to suffer due to the rise of social networking websites and Instant Messaging (IM) clients, although clearly it remains an old but important part of everyday internet use. In fact Instant Messaging (IM) ends up suffering the most, with internet users spending just 4.9% of their time using the service. That is down considerably over three years ago when IM was one of the most popular activities (14%).
However it should be said, and UKOM's study doesn't appear to factor this in, that IM is often an integral part of most social networking platforms as well. We suspect there is some bleed over between the two that would distort this result. That could also be the case with other areas too, such as News and Search. Content is now more shared and integrated than ever before.