comScore, a firm that specialises in measuring the digital world, has released a new overview of internet usage in Europe. It reveals that 373.4 million unique visitors went online during September 2011 (1,420,316,000 globally) and stayed there for a total monthly average of 26.4 hours per person. The UK accounted for 37,197,000 of those visits and we spent an average of nearly 36 hours online (longer than anybody else in Europe).

The study also showed strong growth in September 2011 for the Career Services and Development category (i.e. people looking for jobs or related information) with a 14% increase in unique visitors from the previous month (accounting for 30% of the total European online audience). That's hardly surprising given the current economic problems.


Elsewhere Google Sites (Google, YouTube etc.) continued to rank as the top EU web property in September with 341.1 million unique visitors (reaching over 91% of the total European internet audience). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 263.3 million visitors (70.5%), followed closely by Facebook.com with 250 million visitors (66.9%).

ISPreview.co.uk was curious to know how the latest data compared with previous years and were able to find an old comscore report from June 2008. Back then some 241.8m unique visitors were going online in the EU with the UK holding 34.8m of that figure. The average time spent online in the UK (June 2008) was also 28.5 hours, which compared with an EU average of 23.3 hours.