Americans Logged 101,000 Years of Facebook Time in Single Month

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A report released Sept. 11 by Nielsen, the media research and ratings company, reveals that Americans are spending more time than ever perusing social networks and blogs. Unsurprisingly, the report found that "Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other site."

In May, the most recent month for which data were collected, Americans spent 53.5 billion total minutes on Facebook — or roughly 101,720 years. As there were 140 million unique visitors to the site that month, the average user spent 382 minutes, or 6.4 hours, browsing Facebook in May.

The Nielsen report profiled the type of Internet user who is most likely to use Facebook. Based on its findings, that person is an Asian-American female between the ages of 18 and 34; she lives in New England, makes less than $50,000 per year, and has at least a bachelor's degree.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

Natalie Wolchover
Natalie Wolchover

Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.