A Third of the Time Spent Online is on Facebook and Farmville

If you wanted confirmation that Farmville is becoming the world’s favorite pastime, Nielsen has got the numbers to back it up. The analytics and ratings company has issued a report descriptively titled “What Americans Do Online” which shows that social networking and social gaming are becoming more and more popular at the detriment of traditional popular categories like portals and email. In fact, social networks and online games account for one third of time Americans spent online in June, a significant gain from the last year.

Social networking took up 22.7 percent of the time the average American spent on the web in June, 2010. That’s up from 15.8 percent in June 2009, a 43 percent increase. This amounts to 13 minutes and 36 seconds of every hour spent online. Note that Nielsen also groups blogs in this category, so it’s not Facebook alone that accounts for it.

Online Games were the second most popular activity online, eating up 10.2 percent of the time people spend surfing the web in June. In the same month last year, the figure was at 9.3 percent, 10 percent smaller.

The rise was enough to see it reach the second place in people’s preferences. Online Games is a rather wide category and Nielse doesn’t break it down by social games and traditional online games the likes of World of Warcraft.

Email has fallen to the third spot occupying just 8.3 percent of the time, down from 11.5 percent a year ago. That’s a 28 percent drop and it indicates that people are moving away from traditional forms of communication online towards newer ones like social networking.

This is supported by the fact that instant messaging also saw a decline in use, down from 4.7 percent of the total time to just 4 percent. Portals, like Yahoo and MSN are also losing popularity as more users are accustomed to getting their news from Facebook friends rather than this type of sites.