• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 21, 2014

A Wall Street Journal blog chartsthe amount of time we -- that’s we, the people who go online -- spend doing various time-eating functions on the Web.

We spend:

-- 37 minutes a day on social networks

-- 29 minutes on email

-- 23 minutes with online video

That beats games, which takes up 19 minutes a day. The data was culled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, GfK and Statista.

The WSJ points out that while the amount of time spent watching video had doubled over the last four years, the overall time online video occupies has slipped from 12% in 2013 from 13% the year before.

Watching 23 minutes of video a day about averages out to actual length of a television situation comedy. Just one. 

Since television viewers, on average, spend five hours every day watching TV, according to Nielsen, it’s clear online video has a lot of room to grow.

But I bet it won’t take another four years to double.  

Trending up as a percentage of time spent doing whatever on the Internet is reading blogs, gaming and listening to radio.   

Here’s a scandalous addition to this chart. I pointed it out to a friend just a moment ago and he said, “You know what’s not in there? Porn.”

That’s not scandalous all by itself. But he said it in the hotel room we are sharing in the Boystown neighborhood of Chicago. Both of us are married. To women! (And both of us are going to watch the Yankees-Cubs game at Wrigley Field a few hours from now.)  

But to oblige him, it turns out, there is a stat for that.  

PornHub which is one of the largest porn sites (and I suppose, there too, size matters) says its average user spends 10:51 per visit. People in Mississippi do it the most. Their data also charts what sorts of things people in each region of the country seek out. You can base some broad generalizations, but I won’t make any of them.

On average, according to the IAB poll, Americans spend five minutes a day on newspaper Web sites, or roughly half the time PornHub users spend per session. Is that good or bad?

Most fortunate that my buddy -- and that’s all we are -- mentioned the porn thing because it turns out PornHub now has presented 15 finalists in its contest looking for the best non-gross ad for the site.

They’re pretty funny, though spending time on that seems to be a big waste of time for creative types. In fact, off hand, I can only think of one thing that would be a bigger waste of time.

pj@mediapost.com