Americans Spend a Quarter of Their Online Time on Social Networks

Social networking is a major part of online life. That much is obvious, but now we have some more data to back this up. According to the latest report from Nielsen, about online audiences, four in five internet users, in the US, visit a social network or a blog at least once a month.

Facebook is the top dog, of course, Americans spend more on the social network than they do on any other website. In May, they spent a collective 53 billion minutes in total on the site.

With all of the things that are available inside Facebook, it's no wonder that people rarely leave. With Music coming soon, users will have even less incentives to visit other sites.

For comparison, the runner up is Yahoo, where people spent 17.2 billion minutes. Google came in third with 12.5 billion minutes.

Time spent on social networks and blogs now take up a quarter of total time spent online. The closest such site, in terms of time spent, to Facebook is Blogger, with 700 million minutes. The big surprise though is Tumblr, with 623 million minutes.

The report reveals that 140 million Americans visited Facebook in May this year. That's significantly more than any other site in the category. Interestingly enough, 62 percent of Facebook's page views are attributed to female users.

Again, Blogger was the destination closest to Facebook, in the social sites category, but it only got 50 million visitors in the same period. Moving down the list, Twitter had 23.6 million unique visitors from the US in May.

While Tumblr may be keeping people more engaged, WordPress has significantly more visitors. WordPress got 22.4 million unique visitors in that time, almost as much as Twitter, but Tumblr only 11.8 million.