The recently published Online Nation report uses research from Ofcom and others to produce data looking at what people in the UK are doing online. The report has found that in September 2019 adults on average spent 3 hours and 29 minutes online each day an increase of 18 minutes from the year previous.
In the same timeframe adults spent 3 hours 19 minutes watching TV and 2 hours 40 minutes listening to the radio daily. 71% of all time spent online was on a smartphone. 13% of adults do not use the internet and this figure is unchanged since 2014 with 51% of over 75s not using the internet. Currently 11% of all UK homes have some ‘smart home’ technology and this can include security, lighting and heating. Many people spend their time online on Google-owned and Facebook-owned sites and these sites combined had 78% of the UK online advertising revenue in 2019, the UK online advertising market in 2019 generated 15.7 billion £s.
The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have increased the time that people spend online; with internet users spending 37 more minutes online daily in April 2020 compared to January 2020. Another change from January to April 2020 was the increase in the reach that education, health and government sites had to people in the UK. And the number of people that now use online video calling has risen from 35% using it at least weekly in the year up to February 2020, to 71% in May 2020 with 38% of those using it daily. Zoom as an example reached 13 million adult internet users in April 2020 up from 659,000 in January 2020.