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If we asked you which website you spend the most time on, what would the answer be? Google? YouTube? Maybe Facebook? It’s actually YouTube.
This is coming from Productivity Spot which analyzed web traffic from SimilarWeb for more than 1,000 of the most popular websites in the world. And they found that YouTube is where you spend the most time. Now, on the one hand, this makes sense. Since you’re likely watching a video or two, and it’s probably a longform video too.
According to the data, YouTube got 33.57 billion visits per month, which makes it the second most trafficked website, behind only Google.com. Users spent about 20 minutes and 22 seconds on YouTube.com. That’s double what the other sites had, for amount of time per visit. Now this number is just per visit. So each time you open the app, or head to the website. Not total time, which would likely be much larger.
Google and Facebook saw average time spent per visit at just over 10 minutes. While Instagram was a little over 8 minutes and Wikipedia was far lower at just under 4 minutes.
Why do we spend so much time on YouTube?
The real question here is, why are we spending so much time on YouTube these days? Well, it’s actually quite simple. YouTube has become “cable TV” for a lot of millennials and Gen-Z, and even older generations. Cable TV has gotten so expensive in the past decade or so, while YouTube is free (or $14/month with YouTube Premium), and has loads of content available. Including old shows and movies that are often times free too.
But as for the amount of time on YouTube per visit? That’s the amount of time you’re spending looking for a video and actually watching it. It shows that either people are watching lots of shorts or shorter videos, or watching longer videos like 10-20 minutes long.