Like all the other good, well-adjusted teenagers, the internet is learning to become a more social animal. With 8.38 billion webpages available for the 2.27 billion people online across the world, there’s a lot of different things you can do with your time online. However, as expansive as the content on the internet may be, internet users reportedly spend 22.5% of their time online mulling about on social networks and blogs.
Brain Host, a provider of web-hosting services, took at look at just how social the internet is becoming and what people are doing when they’re diddling around on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
The social internet user apparently isn’t shy about admitting to having some brand loyalty, either, as 53% of active adult users of online social networks say that they follow a brand. Given everybody’s murky understanding about the effectiveness and value of a brand’s followers are on a social network, one thing seems for certain: the potential to generate some kind of advertising revenue exists, just nobody’s really figured out a way to consistently utilize advertising on social networks.
While there’s a significant amount of time being spent being social online, what’s most striking about Brain Host’s findings is that the biggest time-occupier for online people is the perplexing activity that is nondescriptly known as Other. Seriously, people said they spend 35.1% of their time on the internet doing Other, more than social networks and blogs, more than reading the news, more than watching videos or movies, more than emailing or playing games – more than anything. Other. Just doing Other.
How is that people can’t account for 35.1% of their time online? This tells me one of two things. One, it suggests that there are lots of people spending way too much of their time doing the online equivalent of compulsively flipping TV channels.
If that isn’t the explanation, then it could be that we’ve been terrorized into being such a non-disclosing group of people when it comes to talking about what we do online that everybody’s more likely to plead the Fifth now when you ask them what they spend their time doing on the internet. Given that Facebook and its cohorts are encouraging us to never stop sharing our personal information, demurring to do Other might just be a natural recoil from that direction.
