Online Habits Assessed According to Time Consumption

Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - 12:00 by Graham Miller

British people spend a lot of time online each month and a new report from Verto Analytics has looked at which sites and services are monopolising the attentions of modern web users.

Google was found to be a big winner in this respect, accounting for 16.9 per cent of the total time spent online by adults in the UK between April and June this year. That equates to a cumulative 42.7 million days dedicated to services like YouTube, as well as its market-leading search engine, each month.

Facebook came in second overall, with an 11.2 per cent stake in the nation’s time online. This includes not only the social media giant’s main networking platform, but also the other services which it owns including picture sharing behemoth Instagram.

Sixth place went to Amazon, the leading retailer which offers safe shopping online and manages to outdo most of its rivals by keeping a multitude of plates spinning at the same time, rather than offering a single service.

Auction site eBay managed to come in eight, taking up 1.2 per cent of all the time spent online by people across the country. Its recent move to emphasise other elements of its business, enabling people to buy unique items via safe shopping online rather than simply bidding on lots, seems to have shored up its place in the national psyche.

Although it is not as dominant as its rivals, social networking service Twitter just squeezed into the top 10, with 2.8 million days a month secured by its users. It has been attempting to turn this success into a profitable business model for some time, although its moves to integrate e-commerce have yet to be truly successful and it is still struggling to generate ad revenue in the same volumes as Facebook.