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Adults spend an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes a day online via smartphones, tablets and computers in the UK, according to figures from Ofcom’s annual report. Nation online The report dives into digital consumer habits. This number represents a big jump compared to 2023when adults over the age of 18 spend an average of 3 hours and 41 minutes online, especially when you consider that the difference with 2022 was only 8 minutes.
As you can see from the table above, the average is largely driven by usage among younger adults. 18-24 year olds addicted to TikTok and Instagram spend six hours and one minute online. This is 1.5 hours more than in 2023, when they were online for 4 hours and 36 minutes. People over the age of 65 were expected to spend the least time, 3 hours and 10 minutes. One big question is whether today’s younger users will be as active online (or more so) when they become older.
If so, this means that society may be slowly moving towards a fully digital existence.
Altogether, the report spans 116 pages of data and graphics. Here are some of the notable figures jumping in:
horse racing. Overall, there is a long line of services that attract an audience but there are two names that really dominate the top of the list: Alphabet and Meta. Together, properties owned by these two account for nearly half everyone Time spent online by UK adults. YouTube is the most visited, with 94% of all adults spending time on it at some point during the year. On average, visitors spend 49 minutes watching YouTube videos per day.
70% visited everyone Of the three largest meta platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram – with Facebook/Messenger, at 91%, the highest ranking in terms of penetration. This is despite Facebook still being worthless among 18-24 year olds, who have spent just 15 minutes on the main Meta property. Interestingly, Ofcom does not appear to include the use of Google in online visits.
Women are more connected to the Internet than men. Ofcom has specifically singled out some gender-based consumption patterns. Overall, women spend 33 minutes more online than men (4:36 vs. 4:03), and among Generation Z (18-24) time spent is significantly one hour longer, Ofcom found. Some of this may have to do with the nature of the content they consume: female favorites are skewed to social media sites, which are optimized and engineered to keep people scrolling and clicking. TikTok, for example, is the 10th most popular site for women, while it is 16th for men.
Social media. The top of the social media hierarchy remains very well established, with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok occupying the top four spots. The fifth is where things start to get interesting.
Reddit is the fastest growing social media platform, benefiting from the decline of X-née-Twitter. About half of UK online adults, 22.9 million, were using Reddit by May 2024, a 47% increase on the previous year, when 33%, or 15.6 million, said they were using it, Ofcom said. These numbers helped Reddit overtake both X and LinkedIn into fifth place overall among the most popular social media sites. We’ll have to see if this is new or a trend, and if the new entrants maintain some of their momentum.
The most important of these now are Bluesky and Threads. Ofcom notes that Bluesky had just 80,000 users in May this year, with that number rising to 127,000 in August, then a surprise jump of 263% to give it 461,000 users in September, the last month it tracked for this report (which will be updated in subsequent months in the future). And from what we’ve seen in the past couple of months in other markets, Bluesky is likely to continue on this path as it’s suddenly starting to emerge as a leading alternative to X. X is still far behind, with 21.2 million users, with 6.6 million meta topics. Interestingly, although Snapchat gets a lot of attention among younger users, it is largely ignored by other age groups, resulting in it being ranked 10th on the list, with 9.8 million users.
Generative artificial intelligence This service is still very much nascent, but currently, evidence suggests that men are emerging as more keen early adopters. About 50% of men surveyed have used the GenAI service, compared to 33% of women. Ofcom found that women also have less immediate recognition of what these services do, and those who do are more skeptical of their benefits to society and themselves.
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