Commentary

Facebook, Google Lose Share Of Time Spent On-Site As Bing Sees Increase

It’s difficult to say whether spending more time on a search engine is good or bad.

On the one hand, the more time spent and the more searches someone conducts on a search engine, the more advertisements they are likely to see. On the other hand, users spending more time may indicate inferior search algorithms because it takes that much longer for someone to get an answer to their query.

Data released this morning from eMarketer got me thinking. U.S. adult Facebook users this year will spend two minutes less per day -- an average of 38 minutes per day -- logging in to the site from all devices, estimates eMarketer. By 2020, the average daily time will drop to 37 minutes.

And while the minutes that people spend on Facebook keep dropping, they dropped less in the past year than they did in the prior year.

Average daily time spent on Facebook by U.S. adult users fell by three minutes in 2018, per the latest eMarketer forecast on U.S. time spent with media.

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In a research note published Tuesday, eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson attributed Facebook’s decline to the “loss of younger adult users, along with its focus on down-ranking clickbait posts and videos in favor of those that create ‘time well spent.’”

Those searching for information on google.com spent 10:56 minutes on an average session,and spent about 8:23 minutes on bing.com per average session during the past 12 months in the U.S. on desktop and mobile web, according to SimilarWeb data.

Google, however, lost time with searchers. It’s not clear whether that time was lost as a result of people finding the information they need more quickly or whether they gave up and moved on.

And while the average duration on google.com from May 2017 to April 2018 was 11:16, that number fell to 8:23 during the past 12 months. Bing, on the other hand, experienced an increase in time spent per session.

The average duration on bing.com from May 2017 to April 2018 was 7:46, but that rose to 10:56 during the past 12 months.

This gives us something to think about on a Tuesday morning after a long Memorial Day weekend.

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