Nielsen//Netratings for August 2003

Here are Nielsen//Netratings figures for US average consumer home usage of the Internet last month:

    Number of Sessions/Visits per Month: 31
    Number of Domains Visited per Month: 53
    Time Spent per Month: 26 hrs. 15 mins. 23 sec.
    Average Time Spent per Usage of Web: 32 mins. 58 secs.
    Average Time Spent per Domain Visited: only 55 seconds!

Using basic math, we can see that the average American user of the Internet Web surfed on the average of daily, spending about 42 minutes per day. He visited almost two domains per Web surfing session, spending about 32 minutes on each site (a time figure that doesn’t jibe with the 42 minutes he spends daily visiting those nearly two sites) and he spends less than a minute on each Web page.

We also examined Nielsen//Netratings’ data from other major countries and found it rather consistent with US results. The only real difference was that in countries where users are charged by their telephone companies for every dialup minute online, users kept their overall Web surfing session times much shorter, although they saw roughly the same numbers of domains and spent almost exactly the same amount of time (less than a minute) on each Web page as their American brethern.