Study: Gaming Only Second to Social Network Use in Time Consumption

It's not a surprise that the biggest amount of time Internet users in North America spend online is linked to social networking but it's a surprise to see that people are also using a lot of time to play video games when they are surfing, with online play now taking up a bigger amount of time than other traditional uses like email messaging.

The data comes form a study conducted by the Nielsen Company, looking at what people are most likely to do when going online. 22.7 percent of Internet time was spend on social network use, up from about 15.8% during the same period of last year. Gaming came second with 10.2 percent of the time share, up from 9.3% during the previous edition of the study. Both instant messaging and email use have seen quite spectacular drops in one year as most communication is now done through social networks and even when players are enjoying online video games.

Dave Martin, who is an analyst working for Nielsen, has posted on the official company blog that, “Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities - social networking, playing games, and emailing - leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie.”

It's not clear whether the Nielsen study is taking into account the games that users can only access and play while logged into a social network like Facebook. This is a very fast growing segment, with big players like Electronic Arts and Disney aiming to get into the market by buying developers that focus on social gaming. The biggest company creating games for the medium is Zynga. Pretty important gaming franchises, like Civilization, are also set to get Facebook versions in the coming months.