Omar El Akkad, The Globe and Mail
If the future is digital, it seems Canadians are ahead of their time.
Canucks spend more time online than anyone else on Earth, according to new data from Web research firm comScore. And it’s not even by a small margin – the average Canadian spends 43.5 hours a month on the Web, almost twice the worldwide average of 23.1 hours.
Our growing data appetite“I can’t really give you a solid answer as to why we’re so highly engaged,” said Darrick Li, an account manager with comScore. “Since 10 years ago, since the boom of the Internet, we’ve always been at the top of online engagement.”
According to the comScore report, the number of unique online visitors in Canada hovered at about 23 million users in the fourth quarter of 2010, almost unchanged from the same period a year earlier, and less than a 10th of the number of Web users in China. Of 11 countries surveyed, Canada ranks first in the number of website visits per user per month, at 95.2, and second only to South Korea in number of pages viewed, at 3,349.
While difficult to explain, the numbers shouldn’t be all that surprising. For years, Canadians have been the most prolific users of services such as Facebook and YouTube. Late last year, video-streaming service Netflix travelled north of the border, and Canadians responded in huge numbers.
Part of the reason for this high online engagement is easy access to high-speed Internet.
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