Where do we spend time online

[Blog]

Myspace, yahoo, MSN apparently only one porn in the top 20!

http://blog.compete.com/2007/01/25/t...by-time-spent/

[kiania]

Meh. I use/have used in the past 12 months, perhaps 6 of them, most of which are in the bottom half with ebay being the highest.

Then again, I spent all my time organising my urban dead group, and playing on Travian .

[Rosuav]

Meh. Look into the details and you'll quickly see how hard it is to prove those stats at all. It'd be a horrendous invasion of privacy to actually collect those stats from every person on the globe - not to mention that it wouldn't even be possible. So the stats are skewed a bit because it's primarily certain segments of the internet (that is, the segments from whom they can collect stats).

The other difficulty is, how do you count "spending time" on a site? According to the more-information link, it's actually on pageviews. So if I go click-happy all through someone's site, that's a lot of pageviews. But if I get up El Reg, open a few pages, and sit and read them - only a few pageviews, but I've spent a lot of time there. It's far more significant in terms of advertising, too.

So where do I, personally, spend my time? All over the place. I invariably have many windows open. If you add the time I spend on Threshold to the time I spend programming, and throw in a few other bits and pieces like reading/writing email, you'll probably find that I spend fifty hours per day on the computer. That kinda makes it hard to collect stats, as not everyone adopts that habit.

[Pyrosama]

Usually I'm remotely logged in at work with a split VPN connection and I can do work and surf on my other connection. Some of the places I go (though not bad sites) are not permitted at work, so this is good. I'm probably a member of maybe 5 separate online communities from asian forums to political forums, two graphical online games and then Thresh is the only MUD that I play.

I'm either reading/writing emails, freelance writing, research for work and sometimes chatting with a work colleague on Yahoo messenger. It seems like I stay busier online than I used to, but in turn I don't stay online as long either.

[aelyn]

Woo. Pogo! Yeah, I spend a shitload of time on that one. The rest is on doll forums and livejournal. And Wikipedia and youtube get a lot of my time too. But Pogo trumps everything, I think.

[Gesslar]

Originally posted by Rosuav
Meh. Look into the details and you'll quickly see how hard it is to prove those stats at all. It'd be a horrendous invasion of privacy to actually collect those stats from every person on the globe - not to mention that it wouldn't even be possible. So the stats are skewed a bit because it's primarily certain segments of the internet (that is, the segments from whom they can collect stats).

The other difficulty is, how do you count "spending time" on a site? According to the more-information link, it's actually on pageviews. So if I go click-happy all through someone's site, that's a lot of pageviews. But if I get up El Reg, open a few pages, and sit and read them - only a few pageviews, but I've spent a lot of time there. It's far more significant in terms of advertising, too.

So where do I, personally, spend my time? All over the place. I invariably have many windows open. If you add the time I spend on Threshold to the time I spend programming, and throw in a few other bits and pieces like reading/writing email, you'll probably find that I spend fifty hours per day on the computer. That kinda makes it hard to collect stats, as not everyone adopts that habit.

1: There are no privacy issues with logging visits to your site. Since the information is, by definition, non-identifying (you can only grab what the browser publishes, which is nothing about you specifically). Obviously, they're not getting their data from the people (what sites do you visit?), instead, they're going to the most popular hangout places and asking about their usage. (how many people visit you and for how long?).

2: You can most certainly tell how long someone has been at your site. AWSTATS calculates this info from the logs. It looks like this: http://home.gesslar.ca/duration.png

This isn't supposed to BE a "what 100% of the internet population is doing". It's trying to determine the most popular websites and I don't think they're very far off. They also don't care how much time in non-web-browsing activities you spend, that's completely outside of the scope of this report.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by karahd
1: There are no privacy issues with logging visits to your site. Since the information is, by definition, non-identifying (you can only grab what the browser publishes, which is nothing about you specifically). Obviously, they're not getting their data from the people (what sites do you visit?), instead, they're going to the most popular hangout places and asking about their usage. (how many people visit you and for how long?).

No. They're not doing that.

Based on the daily web usage of more than two million members (and growing!) of the Compete community, Compete calculates and estimates total traffic and rank for nearly every site on the web.

This isn't asking webmasters. This is inquiring of the Compete community - that is, people who've downloaded and installed the Compete toolbar. So that's going to give an inherent skew (of unknown magnitude and direction - quite possibly negligible). And it IS actually getting stats from the people.

[Gesslar]

oh! ok, point taken.

[Rosuav]

BTW, my point wasn't that the conclusions are wrong, that people spend time on other sites and not on those. Merely that the precise percentages are hardly an accurate indication of all computer users everywhere.

Actually, Compete specifically work only with stats from the US, so that probably simplifies things for them somewhat. Doesn't greatly affect the stats, though I suspect there are certain geographic and/or cultural forces that would mean that some countries show much greater emphasis on certain sites than do others.

[Pyrosama]

I spend time here http://www.myspace.com/Pyrosama

Since I didn't make it out to see you guys at Threshcon, you don't have pics of me. I have some posted on my myspace, but you have to be my friend to see them! Add me if you have a myspace account.

I am on facebook too, just don't have a bunch of everyday pics there.

Oh, and I'm addicted to myspace Mobsters!