• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 21, 2005

In what could be a bellwether for traditional media outlets like TV migrating to more interactive, Web-like platforms, consumers are spending more time visiting content and communications-related sites online, while decreasing the proportion of time they spend with so-called e-commerce sites. At least that's the conclusion of the June edition of an ongoing tracking study released Wednesday by the Online Publishers Association. The OPA, of course, represents the kind of traditional media content companies - big papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal - who presumably are driving that shift.

According to the OPA's June "Internet Activity Index," online users spent an estimated 557 million hours last month visiting content sites, including news and entertainment pages such as CNN.com, MapQuest, and Windows Media Player--up from 536.4 million hours in May and 500.8 million in June of 2004. Time spent at content sites represented 36.9 percent of all online time in June--a slight increase from both May's 36 percent and 36.5 percent in June of 2004.

Of the categories posting declines, search engines showed the bigger loss, with consumers spending just 4.3 percent of all online time, or 65.4 million hours, on search. The month before, time spent at search engines amounted to 4.7 percent of all online time, or 69.9 million hours; and, in June 2004, search represented 4.4 percent of online time, which came to 60.5 million hours.

Consumers spent 17.5 percent of their Web time at e-commerce sites--down from 18.4 percent in May, but up from 15.7 percent in June of 2004. All together, consumers clocked 263.1 million hours at online retail sites last month, compared to 273.9 million in May and 215.9 million in June of 2004.

The report was compiled using data from Nielsen//NetRatings.