People Will Be Online for a Total of 1.5 Billion Years in 2022, Here’s What That Means for the State of Digital

The internet has likely continued to become an increasingly central component for the manner in which you have currently chosen to end up living your life, and recent estimates suggest that people might spend a total of 12.5 trillion hours online in 2022 alone. That comes up to around 1.5 billion years, which makes sense since it would result in internet users spending around six to ten hours online every single day.

Data Reportal just released a report that analyzes this internet usage, and it has revealed that the number of total internet users has exceeded the urban population of the world. Around 57% of the global population lives in urban areas, whereas 62.5% of the population uses the internet. This is creeping ever closer to the total number of mobile users as well which currently stands at a little over 67% of the global population, although this also means that there are millions of mobile phone users out there who don’t use the internet.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the rate of growth for internet users is a lot faster than that of mobile users. Global mobile users increased by around 1.8% in 2021, which boiled down to around 95 million new unique users. By comparison, unique internet users increased by about 4%, or 192 million to be precise, and another thing to note about this is that Covid-19 restrictions might have prevented analysts from conducting the full extent of their required research so the numbers might be even higher.

Perhaps the most startling, though by no means surprising, statistic is that of social media user growth. It is estimated that around 4.62 billion people in the world were using social media platforms, and their numbers have increased by a rather massive 10% or an incredible 424 million new users in 2021.

The aforementioned 12.5 trillion internet hours will be split among numerous platforms, but the platform that is expected to receive the highest monthly usage hours is YouTube with all things having been considered and taken into account. Android users are estimated to spend a total of around 23.7 hours on YouTube every month, and this puts it well ahead of Facebook which receives 19.6 hours of usage on a monthly basis.

An interesting thing to note here is that TikTok gets the same number of monthly usage hours as Facebook, and it exceeds Instagram’s 11.2 hours a month by a large margin and is also higher than WhatsApp’s 18.6 hours a month.


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