‘Definitive’ figure of daily time spent online is two hours 51 minutes

UK — The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK and UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) have published a ‘definitive’ figure of time spent online: two hours and 51 minutes.

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UKOM is the official cross-industry standards body that measures online audiences using comScore data. It revealed that during the first six months of 2015, the average Briton online spent two hours 51 minutes per day actively using the internet at home and at work. This time is split one hour 16 minutes ( 45%) on PCs/ laptops; one hour nine minutes on smartphones ( 40%) and 26 minutes on tablets ( 15%).

Social media accounts for around 17% of all internet time – an increase from 12% nearly two years ago. Entertainment’s share has dropped drastically from 22% to 12%.

“There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to the various sources claiming to measure how long people spend on different media,” said the IAB’s chief strategy officer, Tim Elkington.

“So, we wanted to put a stake in the ground for internet time to remove this misconception and help advertisers understand how much time they realistically have to play with to reach people online. It equates to about 1 in every 6 waking minutes.”

The data has been sourced from a combination of meters measuring the behaviour of 73,000 people plus thousands of sites and apps being tagged. The resulting figures measure active attention, meaning online the time people are actively using the internet to do something. For example, if a person is browsing the internet then starts using a word document, the internet time is stopped even though the web page is still open.

More information can be found here.

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