For a lot of us, our smartphones are the first thing we see when we wake up and the last thing before we go to bed.
And whether it’s for catching up with friends, checking work emails, or just scrolling through social media, we spend more time than ever before in front of digital screens.
It can be hard to keep track of how much screen time you’re exposed to in a day, but it quickly adds up, especially when you look over the course of a full year.
Here at Sortlist, we’ve analysed the average internet usage across different apps to see how a typical digital year might look, as well as seeing how our annual internet usage varies around the world.
It’s estimated the average internet user spends 145 minutes a day on social media, up from 142 minutes the previous year.
That’s already a considerable amount of time, at just under two and a half hours a day, but how does it look across a longer period of time?
If you were to spend that long on social media each day, it would equate to just under 17 hours each week, or three days each month.
And over the course of an entire year, you’d be spending at least a month scrolling through social media!
Of course, we use our smartphones for far more than just social media, so which other apps do we spend the most time on?
Each of the three categories people sink the most minutes into fell within gaming, with sports gaming taking up the most time, at 23 minutes, followed by casual gaming (21 minutes) and “hyper-casual” gaming (19 minutes) which refers to super simple and easy to play games such as Flappy Bird.
If we were to assume that the average internet user uses each of these apps once a day, that would mean that they would spend five days and nine hours a year on casual gaming, and two days, eight hours on mobile shopping!
Looking at the specific apps that we use the most, it’s YouTube that eats up the most of our time, at just under a day each month, and over 11 days a year.
Not far behind are social media giants Facebook and WhatsApp, which have an average time per user of around 19 and a half hours a month and just under 10 days a year.
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Rank |
App |
Category |
Average time per month |
Average time per year |
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But how does the picture look around the world? Which nations are glued to their screens more than others?
Looking at all internet usage between internet users aged between 16 and 64, the nation with the longest screen time was the Philippines, with an incredible 10 hours and 56 minutes a day spent online, which equates to 166 days a year. It was also the country that spent the most time on social media, with four hours and 15 minutes a day and 65 days a year.
At the other end of the spectrum, Japan spent the least time online, with just four hours and 25 minutes a day, which is six and a half hours less than in the Philippines.
While social media screen time data wasn’t available for Japan, its neighbours in South Korea had the lowest time spent on social media with one hour and eight minutes.
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Time spent using the internet |
Total time spent on social media |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Rank |
Flag |
Countries |
Per day |
Per year |
Per day |
Per year |
So, having seen how long the rest of the world spends scrolling each year, how does your own screen time stack up? Enter a rough estimate of your daily screen time below to find out!
Enter your daily screentime below…
You spend an average of
day(s) a year online.
That’s
days more less than the the global average
Average daily time spent using the internet and social media sourced from Hootsuite’s Global State of Digital 2021 and refer to internet users aged 16-64.
The most popular social media and video streaming apps and the average monthly time spent on these were also sourced from Hootsuite’s Global State of Digital 2021.
Time spent on different categories of apps was sourced from Statista’s data on average app session length per user worldwide from 2019 to 2020, by vertical.
