Where Do You Spend Your Time?

A recently released report by comScore shows that users spent 3.9 billion hours on Microsoft this past year.  This equates to about 15% of all time spent online across the world.  The time people spent online although at Microsoft was dominated by Windows Live Messenger.  Many people use messenger for instant messaging and transferring files; in fact, here in the office we use an instant messaging system (Google Talk). I wouldn’t really consider the time I spend messaging my counterparts across the hall as ‘being’online though.  If we don’t include Messenger in the numbers the internet search giant Google would be in the lead with user time spent online. According to comScore, Messenger accounts for nearly 70% of Microsoft’s figures.

2.5 billion hours was Google’s take in comScores poll.  What this means is that if you don’t account for time spent in Messenger – Google had more hours that they could monetize users experiences online.  Not surprising considering the amount of revenue Google pulled in so far for 2009 according to latest estimates.  YouTube also is taken into account for Google numbers since it’s a Google Property and accounted for about 50% of the time users spent online.  Following Google you find Yahoo and Facebook for global time spent online.

These are important facts and figures to keep in mind as more and more of the world moves online.  If we just want to take into account time spent online within North America, Yahoo came in first, followed by Google with Microsoft third, according to comScore.