Facebook – Surprise – Takes Up Most of Our Online Time a Month

Do you feel like Facebook sucks up half your day? Do you catch yourself clicking over the site over and over again? Well, I have good news for you social media junkies – it might feel like Facebook is consuming you at times, but a new study by Nielsen, reveals that we only spend an average of 7 hours and 45 minutes a month seeing what our friends are up to – approximately 15 minutes a day  total.

Although people spend the most time on Facebook, Google was the most visited website in August of this year with 176 million visitors in the United States. All the sites in the Top 10 saw an increase in visitors and traffic, according to the survey.

Rounding out the top five were YouTube at No. 5 (the average visitor only spends about an hour and 47 minutes a month watching people’s stupid prank videos), MSN/Windows Live/Bing at No. 4, and Yahoo! at No. 3. Microsoft, AOL, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Apple finish out the list.

The survey reveals some other interesting facts about the patterns of Internet users: “Overall 215 million Americans were active on the Internet in August 2011, an increase of 1.2% compared to the previous month,” the survey concludes. “On average Americans spent over 30 hours online during August and visited 99 unique domains. Nielsen estimates 275 million Americans had access to the Internet during August 2011.”

How much time do you spend a day on sites that are not work related? Do you find yourself having to “unplug” from everything once? Are you surprised by the amount of time people spend on Facebook? online in general? or does that sound about right? Let me know your thoughts.

Here’s the Top 10 most visited sites, according to Nielsen:

Site:                                             Visitors:      Time: