Digital 2021: Life lived online

In a year when online time rocketed due to the pandemic, the average global internet user now spends two of every 7 days of the week online, with around 7 hours per day or 42% of our waking lives online. Here’s how We Are Social/Hootsuite’s Digital 2021 breaks down time spent.

Key points:

• Social media adoption surges by 13.2%. Now a majority of the world’s population (53.6%) is on social, 98.8% of them accessing via mobile. On average, each user spends two hours and 35 mins on social each day.
• Second screen becomes first screen. As an average of the data sources cited in the report, internet users now spend around 53% of online time on mobile.
• Search behaviours changing. While 98% still use classic search engines, new formats are gaining importance. 45.3% say they have used voice to search; 44.8% have searched for brands on social; 32.9% have used image recognition on mobile. Social search is key for young users (16-24), for 53.2% of which social is the primary source of brand searches.

^{[Image: We Are Social/Hootsuite]}