A study released by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) shows how in the last six years, users have massively shifted their interest to content and news websites from classic IM and email clients. The research (Internet Activity Index – IAI) was carried out by a US-based industry trade organization that studies the activity of online publishers.

As can be seen from the attached screenshot of statistics provided by OPA in their press release, users have diminished their time spent on Communication-based Internet tools (webmail, email clients, IM applications, forums, bulletin boards) from an average of 5:20 (h:mm) per month in 2003 to 4:54 in 2009. Also, many of Internet users have migrated to a new category introduced in 2008 called Community. This category was introduced after the term of “social network” was coined and introduced in the Internet jargon defining a website were someone can keep in touch with friends in real time.

Currently users spend about 3:01 hours on social networking sites per month, but still much beyond the time they spend on content websites. These content websites include news tickers, personal blogs, online newspapers or editorials, and are taking about 6:58 hours of our routine to check and read.

A growth has been seen in the Search category, where the time spent searching on the Internet has grown from 27 seconds to 57, even if the speed of most search engines has surpassed every programmer's dream lately. Even with the tough competition on the search engine market (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Mahalo, Wolfram Alpha) these companies are not to blame at a closer look. The guilty one is the Internet itself, which has grown to more than 20 billion pages lately.

Of course, these averages are kind of rough. More realistic is the average we spend from our daily time on these categories, and not the time itself. By analyzing the second graph, we can see how the winner is for sure the Content category, which has taken the number one spot in 2009 with 42% of all time spent on the Internet surpassing Communications (27%), Commerce (13%), Community (13%) and Search (5%).

More is to see in the near future on how social networking will evolve, or if the Communications tool eventually bottoms out as humans continue to self-isolate inside an already non-contact environment like the World Wide Web.