Have you ever considered tracking how much time you spend connected to the internet or on social media? Hey, there’s an app for that! But how connected are we, really? For many, the Rogers outage five months ago delivered to each of us (who were on Rogers, tried to connect with someone on Rogers, or buy something from a store that was on Rogers) an eye-opening experience. It showed us how reliant we are on the internet.?
This was published recently, so I thought I would share it with you—just so you know how connected you really are.?
- For each Canadian, the average daily internet usage is 6 hours and 49 minutes. That is almost half our waking day! But rest assured—we are lower than the global average (big sigh there) which comes in at 6 hours and 54 minutes—a whole five minutes difference per day!
- Of that 6 hours and 49 minutes we spend daily on the internet, here are the top five sites and apps we access.
- Chat & messaging
- Social media
- Search engines and web portals
- Shopping
- Maps & location-based services
- ?Almost 1 in 9 Canadians (87.4%) use mobile to access the internet daily (again, slightly lower than the global average of 92.1%). But don’t go saying that is all millennial and Gen Z and Gen Y folks. Mobile usage is relatively consistent across all age groups 16-64!
- Of the 48 countries included in this research by We Are Social and Hootsuite, Canada’s share of mobile internet usage ranked fifth lowest at 43.7%, while the global average was 55.5%.
- But Canadians have not really embraced mobile like the rest of the world (contrary to all the marketers who tell you mobile is the only way to message folks now, and that internet and email are dead). In fact, Canadians’ primary way to access the internet is on computers at a rate of 82.9% versus the global average of 66.8%!
- Canada’s mobile share of web traffic is also among the lowest at 39.9% compared to 59.7% globally or even 52.3% for Americans!
Maybe it’s time to put down those phones, tablets, and computers and write a letter on paper, or chat face to face (not Zoom) with someone, shake their hand, and pat them on the back— literally. Go back, reread these stats, and consider how you might be able to cut back that 6.5 hours per day! I know I am going to work on it!
