One Out of Every Six Minutes Online Is Spent Social Networking

Following recent reports of a substantial drop in Facebook users -- about 6 million people in the U.S. have supposedly quit the site -- comScore’s latest findings prove that social networking is, in fact, more popular than ever.

According to the Web analytics firm, over the past five years, the amount of time that people spend on social networks has doubled. In 2007, social networking represented about 1 out of every 12 minutes spent online. Now, that’s risen to 1 out of every 6 minutes. How’s that for time well spent? Much of this trend can be attributed to the continued success of Facebook, which is the fourth-largest U.S. Web property in audience size and now reaches 73 percent of the total U.S. Internet population each month. At this point, a constant increase in users probably won't be sustainable, says comScore, so Facebook’s future U.S. growth is likely to come from users’ increasing their amount of time spent on the site -- which seems to be working so far. According to one stat, Facebook’s average U.S. visitor engagement has grown from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year.