Wednesday, May 19, 2010 by Adrian

New research suggests that Britons are spending three times the amount of time looking at news online - a staggering 22 million hours a month.

This makes looking for news the second fastest growing way to spend time online, after blogs and social networking.

Research was compiled by the UK Online Measurement Company and was based on tracking 40,000 internet users throughout the UK.

The research suggests that those Britons who are online spent 65 per cent more time using the internet in April 2010 than they did in April 2007:

Here is the UKOM breakdown of time spent online ranked by proportion of the total (showing % change over the last three years):

1. Social networks.blogs: 22.7 per cent, up 159 per cent
2. Email: 7.2 per cent, up 11 per cent.
3. Games: 6.9 per cent, up 15 per cent.
4. Instant messaging: 4.9 per cent, down 66 per cent.
5. Classified/auctions: 4.7 per cent, down six per cent.
6. Portals: 4 per cent, down 10 per cent.
7. Search: 4 per cent, down 3 per cent.
8. Software info/products: 3.4 per cent, down 36 per cent.
9. News: 2.8 per cent, up 84 per cent.
10. Adult: 2.7 per cent, down 3 per cent.

you can find out more at pressgazette

Get regular news from Ouno Creative, a digital and print agency:

Follow Ouno on Twitter Follow Ouno on Facebook