Social networks eat up Americans' online time

12.09.2011
A new survey shows that Americans are increasingly transfixed with social networking sites, with Facebook grabbing more of our time than any other blog or social media.

Social networks and blogs are taking up more and more of Americans time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of our time spent on the Internet, according Nielsen's social media report. Internet users in the U.S. spend more than twice as much time on social networks than they do in the second-most popular category: .

is the top destination of all social networks and blogs. Nielsen reported that 140 million people visited Facebook in May. That's 70% of all active U.S. Internet users. 's Blogger came in second with a distant 50 million visitors that month, while was in the third spot with 23 million.

In addition to more people using Facebook, they also spend the most time at that site.

According to Nielsen, Facebook users spent 53.5 billion minutes on the site this past May. That's compared to , which had people spending 17.5 billion minutes on its site in the same month, or Google, which saw its users spending 12.5 billion minutes there.

"I'm to see that people spend 25% of their online time on social networks," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "Social networks have become the online focus for many new computer users -- particularly older people who might not have extensively used computers in their working lives."