Canadians top U.S. and rest of world for number of hours spent online: survey

Canadians are the world’s heaviest users of the Internet, spending about an hour more online than the second place ranked United States, a new study finds. According to Media Metrix Canada’s Total Canada at Home Web Use Report, users here logged on for an average of 932 minutes per month during April, while Americans trailed at 876 minutes. The increase over last year is significant. In May 2000, the average time spent online was 513 minutes. This year’s numbers represent an 82 per cent jump. The number of unique visitors also climbed, from just under 12 million last year to 13.5 million in April, an increase of 14 per cent. According to Media Metrix, Canadians spend a total of 12.7 billion minutes online at home in April. The demographic breakdown revealed one important new trend. Women in Canada are more likely to be surfing the ’Net than men. Figures show females spend 955 minutes online while males only pegged in at 911 minutes. Women in their late 40s were the largest demographic group, logging on for almost 22 hours in April. Not surprisingly, children are the least likely to be online. Children aged two to 11 posted only 238 minutes. Boys were more apt to be web-savvy than girls, at 263 minutes versus 206 minutes respectively. While Canada has long suffered two solitudes culturally, the digital divide does not appear in the linguistic demographic. Numbers for French Canada closely mirror the results for the country as a whole. A majority of the top 10 most popular domains and digital media sites are the same. MSN.com had a reach of 64.3 per cent nationally, while francophone popularity was 66.3 per cent. Sympatico had a greater impact in French Canada than in the rest of the country. Its 46.7 per cent reach among francophones placed it in third position, while the total Canadian figures dropped it to seventh place, with a reach of 33.4 per cent. Other popular sites on both lists were Yahoo.com, ICQ applications and, Microsoft.com. Three uniquely French web hosts made the list of most popular sites among francophones. Infinit.com registered at seventh place, with Toile.com at ninth and Multimania.com finishing in 10th spot. The divide was more pronounced on the list of top 10 web properties. While sites like Microsoft, Sympatico-Lycos and AOL Time Warner appeared on both the Canada and the francophone rosters, each featured four sites that did not appear on the other list. For the country as a whole, those web properties included Cnet Network and Walt Disney Internet sites. On the French-speaking side, it included Vivendi-Universal and the Quebec government site.

Canadians top U.S. and rest of world for number of hours spent online: survey

News | 06/04/2001 4:00 am EDT

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