Photo borrowed from here.
Hello fellow netizens! 
There’s a new study by the Online Publishers Association or OPA that says web users spend 42% of their time online on content sites. OPA segregated all sites into 5 groups: Commerce, Communications, Community, Content, and Search.
Commerce sites include the like of Amazon and eBay. Examples of communication sites are Yahoo mail and Gmail. Popular community sites include MySpace and Facebook. Search is, of course, represented by Google and Yahoo Search. Content sites are what make up most of the web with giants such as wikipedia, CNN, and NatGeo leading this highly diverse category.
Here’s the breakdown of the time spent by surfers in the 5 categories:
1. Content = 42%
2. Communication = 27%
3. Community = 13%
4. Commerce = 13%
5. Search = 5%
People’s habit of reading content sites was quite a jump from 34% in 2003. The study suggests that the trend is most likely to continue in the future.
Bottomline, people are reading content sites like blogs. We are right where the action is. If anybody wants to try and earn some money online, the general agreement is to develop a topic we are passionate about.
Opinions?
Source: DNjournal.com
5 Comments
I have found that outside work related activity, I spend about 75% of my time online reading blogs…. outside of that, most of the remaining time is spent shopping.
This is an absolute truth. Web users like me spend most of our times in quality websites which provides rich contents that satisfy our quest for knowledge. I don’t think I will stay even a minute longer in a blog or website that offer something below standards. thanks for sharing this wonderful article.
I believe that is already a given. People will not spend a lot of time on crappy sites. Our audience are the ultimate judge of how good our content are.
Thanks.
Web users like me spend most of our times in quality websites which provides rich contents that satisfy our quest for knowledge
Hi its my first comment but felt I had to say a few words on this subject. I have recently become involved in on line marketing and have been taking in so much information my head hurts ! The over riding theme I keep getting, is that the most important factor is fresh original content if you want your site to get ranked and respected. I do believe content is very important, however, I could give examples of sites that rank on the front page of Google with NO content. Not just a bit of poor content but with absolutely nothing ! This one site is in direct competition with me (keyword wise) and all it is, is a one page Wordpress blog page. A domain name with wordpress installed and thats it, and its number 3 on Google for the keyword phrase. I am working hard to constantly improve and update my site with new content, articles, products for sale etc and its a bit annoying (to say the least) when I am outranked by something which could be done in literally less than a minute. So to keep happy and contented followers content is king, but just to get a ranking the domain name and correct optimization seems more important. Get the domain name right and you will find yourself on the Google front page in record time. I also have another site which is number 3 on Google (different keyword phrase) and it was there in less than a week of putting the site live. It has very little content at the moment, but I am working on it and it will be updated with good stuff in the near future. So content is the key to keep people happy but the domain name and correct on page optimisation is the key to get a ranking quickly. Great site by the way !