A new Comcast study has shown that of the 1.1 billion people who accessed the internet in May 2009, one third accessed one social network within that month.
Australia ranks 17th at 3.4 average hours per visitor, with 374 average pageviews for the month. Russia topped the list with 6.6 hours per visitor and a massive 1307 pageviews.
The study excluded computers in net cafe's or from mobile phones and PDAs, which may underestimate just how connected our societies have become.
With Twitter and Facebook readily available on mobiles, many people are online almost all of the time, in one way or another. For Australians that's 6.8 minutes and just over 10 pageviews per day on social networking sites.
This suggests that Australians, on average, like to check their social networking sites almost every day. They don't don't spend too much time on it, but the appetite is growing. According to Hitwise, traffic to Social Networking and Forum sites jumped from 8.5% to 10% of Australian market share in the same 12 months.
During the same period, data from Nielson showed an 82% increase in total time spent on social networking sites, and a 67% increase in the average time.
Twitter was at the standout performer with the twitter.com website
growing from 1.2 million in May 2008 to 18.2 million in 2009, an
increase of 1448%
Time spent on Twitter also grew from 6 to 17 minutes over the year.
Comcast Study
Nielson study
