Nielsen: Gaming surpasses email in time spent online

Matthew DeCarlo

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According to new data from Nielsen, Americans spend 10.2% of their time online playing games, up from 9.3% in 2009, ranking as the second busiest activity. That's ahead of email which accounts for a declining 8.3%, but far behind social networking at 22.7%, the most used Web activity. Communicating and networking as a whole, including social networks, blogs, email and instant messaging represents some 36% of the time folks in the US are on the Internet.

Interestingly, watching videos and searching rank sixth and seventh, with less than 4% each. Nielsen reports that 10 billion videos were served in June 2010, with the average consumer spending three hours and 15 minutes streaming content during the month -- less than I would have guessed. A massive 34.3% slice of the pie is dedicated to "other," which supposedly includes 74 remaining online sectors, but it's probably safe to assume a significant portion is porn.


Although desktop and laptop users are emailing less, it makes up an increasing 41.6% of the time people are connected with mobile devices. Portals are the second heaviest activity on handsets with 11.6%, and social networking trails closely with 10.5%. Search, news, entertainment, music, weather, sports, and videos represent most of the remaining share, while "other" takes a similar cut as portals. How would you say your time online is divided?

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Dammit, you guys beat me to it. I know that other is porn.

We all love it. :p
 
If you made a chart up like that for me it would be a lot more time spent on the 'gaming' section- with the rest of split between stumble, a few forums, a smidgen of facebook and IM'ing, checking my email about once every other week, and of course a healthy chunk of "other" in there. That's at least when I'm home.

At work its email & techspot :p.
 
Other = Stealing music/movies*

*brought to you by your friends at the RIAA and MPAA :)
 
@ TomSEA: lol

I love how the first comment on the Source of this pole also has the word ''porn'' in it!

Don't trust the source. How much data did they get, who, where, when and how?
 
If you click the link that goes back to the main article, it tells a bit more detail. Apparently the participants had some kind of tracking device on their computer that recognized specific categories that their internet usage pertained to. The data for mobile device usage (charted separately in the main article) was gathered by people manually reporting their usage.
 
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