Brits spend three hours a day on web

The average Briton now spends one in six of their waking hours online, as we spend more time using social networking sites.

A study of 73,000 people found that UK citizens spent an average of two hours, 51 minutes on the web each day in the first six months of the year.

And while many office workers find themselves sat in front of a computer for much longer periods, more than half of the time Britons spent online was actually on mobile devices.

According to the research, by the Internet Advertising Bureau and the UK Online Measurement Company, Britons spend an average of one hour and 19 minutes online on their desktops or laptops – around 45 per cent of their time online.

The rest of the time is spent on handheld gadgets which they can check on the move, including one hour and nine minutes a day on their smartphones, and an average of 26 minutes on their tablets.

The average UK citizen now devotes nearly half an hour a day to social media – around one in every six minutes they spend online, up from one in eight minutes two years earlier.

The news comes just a week after Facebook announced that one billion users had – for the very first time – logged into the site on a single day.

Britons spend around six percent of their time online playing computer games, up from three percent two years earlier.

We also find an average of seven-and-a-half minutes a day for other online ‘entertainment’, such as catch-up television services like the BBC iPlayer and Netflix.

But Britons have much less time for serious subjects online. We spend around six minutes and 40 seconds catching up with news every day, and less than five minutes checking our emails.

‘Mobile time is more heavily skewed towards social networking and games, whilst desktop is more loaded towards email and entertainment such as film and multimedia,’ said Scott Fleming, UK Online Measurement Company’s general manager.