- January 3, 2012

People Spent 6.7 Billion Hours on Social Networks in October

Social networking sites now reach 82 percent of the world's online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world.

Particularly telling of social networking’s emergence is the amount of time people spent on sites such as Facebook, Orkut, or VKontakte. As a percentage of all the time people spend online, social networking activity has more than tripled in the last few years. In October 2011, Social Networking ranked as the most popular content category in worldwide engagement, accounting for 19 percent of all time spent online.Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online is now spent on social networking sites – a stark contrast from when the category accounted for only 6 percent of time spent online in March 2007.

These findings are part of a recent Comscore report, It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed. To download the report, please click here.

Time Spent Online on Key Internet Categories