According to Neilsen the number of Internet users who visited a social network or a blog increased by 24 percent from April 2009 to April 2010, while the average person spent 66 percent more time on those sites during that period.
About 75 percent of all Internet users visited a social network or blog in April 2010, and they spent 22 percent of their online time - more than 110 billion minutes - on those sites, Nielsen said.
That's more than twice the number of minutes Nielsen recorded a year earlier. The average person spent 5 hours, 51 minutes on these sites in April, compared to 3 hours, 31 minutes per person during the previous April.
And according to Nielsen, Facebook was the third most popular online brand, with 54 percent of all Internet users visiting the site. Google, which reached 82 percent of online users, was still first, while a combined MSN, WindowsLive and Bing drew 62 percent of the audience. Yahoo was fourth at 53 percent.
Facebook is the main driver of this trend. Since early 2009, the Palo Alto company has increased membership from fewer than 200 million to nearly 500 million. However one of the largest growth areas for social media is Niche community applications where investment is increasing as users move to Niche social sites.
But while the average user spent 1 hour, 21 minutes on Google during April, Facebook users were logged on an average of 6 hours.
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