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Global Audience Spends Two Hours More a Month on Social Networks than Last Year

March 19, 2010

On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year. While the U.S. boasts the largest unique social networking audience, Italian and Australian web surfers led the way for average time on site with more than six hours each in February.

Social Network Usage By Country / Feb 2010
Home & Work
Country Time per Person
(hh:mm:ss)
Average 5:27:33
Italy 6:27:53
Australia 6:25:21
United States 6:02:34
United Kingdom 5:50:56
Spain 4:50:49
Brazil 4:27:54
France 4:12:01
Germany 3:47:24
Switzerland* 3:26:00
Japan 2:37:07
Source: The Nielsen Company

*home only

Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009.

global-social-audience

Across the 10 countries measured, Facebook drew the largest active unique audience globally and claimed nearly three times the sessions per user of MySpace, the next closest network. Facebook users also spent more time per session, logging nearly six hours per user across the globe.

Global* Social Network Traffic / Feb 2010
Web Site % Reach of Active
Social Users
Sessions per Person Time per Person (hh:mm:ss)
Facebook 52% 19.16 5:52:00
Myspace.com 15% 6.66 0:59:33
Twitter.com 10% 5.81 0:36:43
LinkedIn 6% 3.15 0:12:47
Classmates Online 5% 3.29 0:13:55
Source: The Nielsen Company
*United States, Brazil, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Unique audience represents active usage, not overall membership of social networks

For more: Contact The Nielsen Company or read about our global consumer & media expertise.
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3 Comments »

  • ipub said:

    What about Canada ?

  • sms said:

    and Morocco ?

  • Anthony said:

    I am very skeptical regarding Japanese numbers. If you restrict your research to Facebook, Twitter, etc. then indeed Japanese people don’t use these much. But they have a local social network, Mixi, that has literally dozens of millions of members, and people are constantly connected to this site from their mobile phones or at work.

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