Social NetworksBlogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online

The popularity of social media is undeniable – three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.

Brazil not only tops the list of teams favored to win this year’s World Cup, they also top the charts with the highest percentage (86%) of Internet consumers visiting a social network. The popularity of social networking in Brazil is due to the Orkut phenomenon, which first appeared there in 2004 – by September 2005, half of the Brazilian Internet population visited Orkut. Australian web users average the most time on social networking sites, averaging 7 hours 19 minutes in April, followed by the U.S. and Italy with around six and a half hours each.

Facebook’s reach is the widest in Italy, capturing two-thirds of the active unique audience in April 2010, making the site relatively more popular in Italy than in the three major English-speaking markets. Australia, the U.S. and the UK follow Italy with over 60% of active online consumers visiting the site. In contrast, Japanese people have the least appetite for Facebook, with reach and time spent markedly lower than in any of the other countries measured. Ameba, which offers a micro-blogging platform akin to Twitter, is the most popular social networking and blogging site in Japan, visited by 38% of Japanese people online while Facebook is the 40th most popular.