Adults are spending an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes each day online across smartphones, tablets and computers in the U.K., according to figures from Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report diving into consumer digital habits. The figure is a big jump compared to 2023, when adults over 18 spent an average of 3 hours and 41 minutes online, especially when you consider that the difference with 2022 was just 8 minutes.
As you can see from the table above, the average is being driven in large part by usage among younger adults. 18-24 year-olds hooked on TikTok and Instagram are spending six hours and 1 minute online. That is up by 1.5 hours over 2023, when they were online for 4 hours 36 minutes. Perhaps predictably, the over-65 bracket is spending the least time at 3 hours, 10 minutes. One big question is whether younger users of today be as active online (or even more) when they become the seniors.
If so, that implies that society may be slowly marching into an all-digital existence.
The report in total stretches into 116 pages of data and graphics. Here are a few notable figures that jump out:
Two-horse race. Overall, there is a long tail of services that attract audience but two names really dominate the top of the list: Alphabet and Meta. Together, properties owned by these two take up nearly half of all time U.K. adults spend online. YouTube is the most-visited, with 94% of all adults spending time on it at some point in the year. On average, those visiting are spending 49 minutes viewing YouTube videos daily.
70% visited all of Meta’s three biggest platforms — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — with Facebook/Messenger, at 91%, its highest-ranked in terms of penetration. That is despite Facebook still being a dud among 18-24 years, who spent just 15 minutes on Meta’s flagship property. Interestingly, Ofcom doesn’t seem to include Google usage in is online visitations.
Women are more online then men. Ofcom has singled out in particular some gender-based patterns in consumption. Overall, women are spending 33 minutes more online than men (4:36 versus 4:03), and among Gen Z (18-24) the time spent is even more pronounced at 1 hour longer, Ofcom found. Some of this might have to do with the nature of what kind of content they are consuming: females’ preferred sites skew to social media sites, which have been optimised and engineered to keep people scrolling and clicking. TikTok, as one example, ranks as the 10th most popular site for women, whereas it’s at 16th for men.
Social media. The top of the social media hierarchy remains very entrenched, with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in the top four slots. Fifth is where things start to get interesting.
Reddit is the fastest growing social platform, profiting from the decline at X-née-Twitter. Ofcom said that about half of the U.K. online adult population, 22.9 million, were using Reddit by May 2024, up 47% compared to the year before, when 33%, or 15.6 million, said they were using it. Those numbers helped Reddit pip both X and LinkedIn to fifth position overall among most popular social media sites. We’ll have to see if this is novelty, or a trend, and whether newer arrivals sustain some of their momentum.
Chief among those right now are Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky, Ofcom notes, had just 80,000 users in May of this year, with that figure going up to 127,000 in August, and then a sudden 263% jump to give it 461,000 users in September, the last month it tracked for this report (which will get updated with the subsequent months in the future). From what we have seen in the last two months in other markets, Bluesky will likely have continued that trajectory as it suddenly started to emerge as the leading alternative to X. X is still a far ways ahead, with 21.2 million users, with 6.6 million for Meta’s Threads. Interestingly, although Snapchat gets a lot of attention among younger users, it’s largely ignored by other age groups, leading to it in number-10 in the list, with 9.8 million users.
Generative AI is still a largely nascent service, but for now, the indications are that men are emerging as more keen early adopters. Some 50% of men surveyed have used a GenAI service, compared to 33% of women. Women also have less immediate recognition of what these services do, and those who do know are more skeptical of their benefits to society and themselves, Ofcom found.
Ofcom’s findings in this report are also important because in part they become the groundwork for investigations and other work that it undertakes. For example, it expects to release Codes of Practice in the first half of 2025 for the protection of children online. To that end, it also highlights a number of areas where online content and engagement are falling short in terms of safety:
Although two-thirds (67%) of online adults said that “the benefits of being online outweigh the risks,” that is actually down from a year ago, when the figure was 71%.
Young adults may be online more, but they don’t seem to love that: Ofcom said they “were less likely than older people to think they had a good balance between their online and offline lives, and older children were more concerned than younger ones about the time they spent online.”
Misinformation looms large as a harm, with 39% of users 13 and older saying they had encountered some as of June 2024. 30% of users aged 13 and older said they’d also seen content that “made them feel uncomfortable, upset or negative.” Both percentages are up on 2023.
Hateful, offensive or discriminatory content is also on the rise, with 26% of adults saying they have come across it online (compared to 23% in 2023).
Younger users are lying to get online. Ofcom found that 20 percent of 8-15 year-olds have claimed to have a user age of at least 18 on a social media platform, which underscores the challenges of policing that. “There are indications that there are more frequent efforts from services to verify their date of birth,” Ofcom notes, with users indicating that they are seeing more checks on ages made by the social media sites. (Whether these are adhered to is another question.)
Ofcom found that 35% of users aged 13-17 said they had come across offensive or ‘bad’ language online, which is down on the 40% from a year ago. Harmful content related to body image continues to be a problem especially among female teens, Ofcom found. That’s a tendency that social sites like TikTok are attempting to proactively curtail themselves before they are forced by regulators to do so.
