Adults in the UK spend an average of four hours and 20 minutes online each day via smartphones, tablets and computers, according to figures from Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report, which surveys consumers’ digital habits. This is a big leap compared to 2023, when adults aged 18 and older spent an average of 3 hours and 41 minutes online. This is especially true considering that the difference from 2022 is only 8 minutes.
As you can see in the table above, the averages are highly dependent on usage by young adults. Hooked on TikTok and Instagram, 18-24 year olds spend 6 hours and 1 minute online. This is an increase of 1.5 hours compared to 2023, when people were online for 4 hours and 36 minutes. Perhaps as expected, people aged 65 and older spend the least amount of time, at 3 hours and 10 minutes. One big question is whether today’s younger users will be just as (or more) active online when they become older.
If so, this means that society is slowly marching towards a fully digital existence.
The report consists of a total of 116 pages of data and graphics. Here are some notable numbers that stand out:
two horses racing. Overall, there’s a long list of services attracting audiences, but two names really top the list: Alphabet and Meta. The real estate owned by these two together accounts for almost half of their total assets. every How much time UK adults spend online. YouTube is the most visited site, with 94% of all adults spending time on YouTube at some point during the year. On average, visitors spend 49 minutes watching YouTube videos every day.
70% visited every Among Meta’s top three platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram), Facebook/Messenger ranked highest in terms of penetration at 91%. This is despite Facebook still being a dud among 18-24 year olds, who spend just 15 minutes on Meta’s key assets. Interestingly, Ofcom does not seem to include the use of Google in online visits.
Women go online more than men.. Ofcom specifically noted some consumption patterns by gender. Overall, women spend 33 minutes more time online than men (4:36 versus 4:03), but this is even more pronounced for Generation Z (18-24 year olds), who spend an hour longer, Ofcom found. Yes. Some of this may have to do with the nature of the kind of content they consume. Women’s preferred sites skew toward social media sites that are optimized and designed to keep people scrolling and clicking. TikTok, for example, is the 10th most popular site among women, while it ranks 16th among men.
social media. Its position at the top of the social media hierarchy is very firmly entrenched, with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok occupying the top four slots. The fifth is where things start to get interesting.
Reddit is the fastest-growing social platform, benefiting from the decline of X-née-Twitter. Ofcom said that by May 2024, 22.9 million people – around half of the UK’s online adult population – were using Reddit. This is a 47% increase from the previous year when 33%, or 15.6 million people, said they use Reddit. These numbers helped Reddit push X and LinkedIn into fifth place overall among the most popular social media sites. We’ll have to see if this is a novelty or a trend, and if the new arrivals maintain some momentum.
Currently the most important of them are Bluesky and Threads. According to Ofcom, Bluesky had just 80,000 users in May this year, that number rose to 127,000 in August, and then suddenly jumped 263% to 461,000 users in September, the last month tracked by the report. Recorded. It will be updated next month). What we’ve seen in other markets over the past two months is that Bluesky may have continued on this trajectory, suddenly emerging as a major alternative to X. X is still way ahead, with 21.2 million users and 6.6 million users. For meta threads. Interestingly, while Snapchat has a lot of traction among younger users, it is largely ignored by other age groups, ranking 10th on the list with 9.8 million users.
Generating AI The service is still in its early stages, but for now there are signs that men are emerging as more keen early adopters. Nearly 50% of men surveyed used GenAI services, compared to 33% of women. Women are also less immediately aware of what these services are, and those who are are more skeptical about the benefits to society and themselves, Ofcom found.
Ofcom’s findings in this report are also important. In part because it is the basis for research and other work. For example, a code of practice to protect children online is due to be published in the first half of 2025. To this end, we highlight a number of areas where online content and engagement fall short in terms of safety.
Two-thirds (67%) of online adults say “the benefits of being online outweigh the risks,” but that figure is actually down from a year ago when it was 71%.
Young adults may be online more, but they don’t seem to like it. Ofcom said: “Older children are less likely than older people to think they have a good balance between their online and offline lives, and older children are more worried than younger children.” About time spent online.”
Misinformation can be harmful, and 39% of users aged 13 and older said they had encountered this information as of June 2024. 30% of users aged 13 and older said they had also seen ‘content that made them feel uncomfortable, upset or negative’. .” Both rates increased in 2023.
Hateful, offensive or discriminatory content is also on the rise, with 26% of adults saying they have encountered such content online (23% in 2023).
Young users are lying to get online. Ofcom found that 20% of children aged 8 to 15 claimed their user age was over 18 on social media platforms, highlighting the challenge of policing this. “There are indications that efforts to verify date of birth across services are becoming more frequent,” Ofcom said, noting that users were seeing more age verification on social media sites. (Whether this is compliant is another question.)
Ofcom found that 35% of people aged 13 to 17 had encountered offensive or ‘bad’ language online, down 40% from a year ago. Harmful content related to body image continues to be a problem, particularly among female teenagers, Ofcom said. This is a trend where social sites like TikTok are proactively trying to curtail themselves before regulators force them to do so.
