Facebook, Farmville soaking up more time: study

Almost a third of the time Americans are online is spent at social media sites like Facebook and playing online games, a new study shows.

The report by Nielsen Online, titled What Americans Do Online,  describes changing internet use during a period of intensifying competition.

While Google's leading search technology has proved a powerful advertising vehicle and Yahoo leads in banner ads, Facebook's dominance in the growing social networking sector is recognised as a major competitive threat to both of those companies.

Strikingly, Nielsen's research also showed that Americans now spend more time playing games than handling email - in part because tens of millions are staying in touch on Facebook rather than communicating on services such as Yahoo Mail or Google's Gmail.

"That's the logical conclusion," said David Martin, a Nielsen analyst. "A platform like Facebook incorporates email and instant messaging.

"Social networks have incorporated those basic functions in a much larger system of communication, content management and even gaming. The growth has come at the expense of traditional portals, email platforms and IM."

American internet users are, on average, spending more than six hours a month on social networking sites and more than four hours a month playing online games, the research found.

In addition to those activities, users on average spent another 14 hours a month online at news, entertainment and other sites.

Yahoo ranked as the No. 1 portal, ahead of MSN and Google, as well as the leading provider of email and instant messaging services. Google led the search category by a wide margin, and its YouTube division led the video/movie sector.

Electronic Arts topped a highly competitive game sector, Apple's iTunes dominated the "multicategory entertainment" area, and eBay edged out Craigslist in the "auctions-classifieds" category.

Nielsen's time research, which tracked 200,000 internet users and compared June 2009 to June 2010, roughly coincides with a 12-month period in which Facebook doubled its global reach to 500 million users.

It has been especially popular among younger internet users. A recent study of US internet users by the Pew Research Centre found that more than half of those between age 18 and 45 had a profile on a social networking site, compared with 30 percent of the baby boomers under 65 and 6 percent of the population over 65.

Facebook's dominance in social networking is such that Nielsen found it accounts for nearly 85 percent of time spent in the sector, compared with 5.6 percent for runner-up MySpace, 1.1 percent for Twitter and 1.1 percent for Blogger.

Overall, the combination of social networks and online games are consuming 32.9 percent of internet time, up from a combined 25.1 percent, Nielsen found.

The growth was driven by a 43 percent increase in time spent on social networking and 10 percent increase on games.

Meanwhile, time spent on e-mail, portals and instant messaging showed marked declines.

Only one other internet activity showed a striking increase: the viewing of videos and movies on sites such as YouTube, Netflix or Hulu increased by 12 percent during the period, to account for 3.9 percent of overall time spent online.

American internet users typically spent 3 hours and 15 minutes per month watching online videos in June.

Social networking and online games have fed off each other ever since Facebook opened its platform to application developers in the spring of 2007. The games of such startups as Zynga, Playfish and Playdom have attracted millions of users and built profitable businesses.

Google, which owns a social networking site called Orkut that is popular in Brazil, has reportedly been in talks with Zynga and others about ways to integrate games into Google's developing social networking strategy.