US 12-24 yr olds spend 20% longer online than a year ago

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by: Lynette Webb

I’ve not posted much recently and one of the reasons is that I’ve been submerged in pitches & Comscore hell. But along the way I’ve come across some interesting factoids.
For instance, over the past 12 months, the time that 12-24 year olds in the US spend online has grown by a fifth! This holds whether you compare May 05 to May 06 (23%) ; June 05 to June 06 (17%), or July 05 to July 06 (20%).

It’s being driven by both an increase in the number of days during the month on which the Internet is used (eg: for July, up from 15 days in 2005 to 16.9 days in 2006) , and an increase in the average time spent online per day that it’s used (eg: for July, up from 90 minutes to 96.6 minutes). Overall, US 12-24 year old Internet users spent 27.2 hours online in July 2006, versus only 22.5 hours in July 2005… 4.7 hours more!

The biggest driver of this, by a mile, is MySpace. In July 2006, 44% of US 12-24 year old Internet users visited MySpace at least once during the month, up from 24% the preceding July. As well, the average time spent during the month on MySpace by those who visited skyrocketed – from 79 minutes in July 2005 to 225 minutes now. This alone boosted the average time spent online by 12-24 year old Internet users by 80 minutes per month. (Calculated as: 225 mins x 44% less 79 mins x 24%). 80 minutes = 28% of 4.7 hours. And this is without taking into account the time spent trawling all the other sites that are part of the MySpace ecosystem (eg: those peddling MySpace layouts, icons, etc).

[Source for raw data is Comscore; with analysis by me. 🙂 ] 

Original Post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/223802004/