Verschwendung der Zeit

Waste of time: Scary high in the USA – that scenario soon here too?

Big numbers – frightening impact: Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May! That’s too much? When will the ultimate point in wasting time be reached? Is the PC and this platform really a “life replacement”? We at Freizeitcafe got to the bottom of the latest study – whether world domination will soon really determine our time?

Waste of time

According to the market research institute Nielsen, US citizens spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on the social network Facebook in May of this year. Accordingly, each user spent over 12 minutes there every day – we think that time is awesome! What exactly for? To delete or accept the countless advertising emails, game invitations, fake friend requests, etc.?

By the way: The competition from Yahoo and Google remains far behind in the statistics. In a global comparison, the USA is only in 9th place.

You’ve often heard about how much time can be wasted when visiting Facebook, but these statistics make the dominance of the provider very clear. Yahoo is a distant second with 17.2 billion minutes and Google with 12.5 billion minutes spent. Unfortunately, exact figures about the distribution of user numbers per country are not available, so Nielsen had to extrapolate. With an estimated 140 million Facebook users in the USA, that leaves 12.30 minutes a day. Nielsen announced that this market power also exists in many other countries. 4 out of 5 active surfers are generally active on social networks. In the USA, the most popular destinations behind social networks (and blogs) are portals for online games, email providers, other portals, videos and films, search engines, messengers, software manufacturers, auction houses and news.

But there are other findings: the microblogging platform tumblr was able to triple its share. And the mobile use of social networks has also increased dramatically; almost 40 percent of all users now obtain their data via a cell phone. Users over the age of 55 are particularly fond of using their smartphones for this occasion. The apps for Facebook & Co. are the most used in the USA. By the way: Only 30 percent of social network users buy their goods offline.

The majority of U.S. blog and Facebook users are female, ages 18 to 34, with college degrees and incomes under $50,000 per year. But the citizens of the USA are not the most intensive users of MySpace, Facebook & Co. The power users are the surfers from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the USA and Great Britain.

My conclusion about wasting time 

Hopefully this „fashion wave of wasting time“ doesn’t spread to us any more – there are already many signs of it. Unfortunately, the USA has always been a pioneer of trends… but also to our dismay? We will see! Better live!