How Americans Spend Their Time Online

We examine where people spend their time online, analyzing desktop browsing data collected from the National Internet Observatory (NIO). Key findings include: ● A few platforms dominate where we spend our time. The top 10 platforms captured about half (49%) of all online time, with Gmail at number one with 16.4%. ● A tiny number of companies dominate where we spend time. Most user attention is funneled through a handful of corporations. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) alone accounts for 35% of total browsing time in our sample, followed by Meta (8.9%), Microsoft (5.1%), Yahoo (4.3%), and Amazon (3.0%). These five companies capture more than half of all time Americans spend online on desktop. ● Americans spend half their online time on just two things: social media (25.3%) and email (24.9%). ● AI is already bigger than news. Large Language Model (LLM) tools, such as ChatGPT, now account for 2.9% of total online time, while news is only 2.5%. ● The Web is highly age-segregated. Users over 65 spend 36.7% of their online time on email and 14% on Facebook, versus 11% and 2%, respectively, for users under 30. Older people are still using Yahoo and AOL for email (9%, 2%, respectively), both of which barely register among younger users. The oldest cohort spends 4.7% of their time on news sites, far more than the youngest cohort (1.2%). In contrast, users under 30 spend 13% of their time on YouTube, 9% on Google apps (Docs, Drive, Meet, Classroom, and other Google services excluding Gmail, Search, and YouTube), and 3% on ChatGPT, as compared to 6%, 3%, and <1%, respectively, among the oldest cohort.