Desktop internet use by Canadians highest in world, comScore says

Canadians are among the biggest online addicts in the world, visiting more sites and spending more time visiting websites via desktop computers than anyone else in the world, according to comScore Canada.

Continuing a trend comScore noted in its 2014 study of Canadian online habits, while Canadians use their desktops to go online more than anybody else does, smartphones are increasingly the way we accessing the internet.

• 49% of time online now spent on mobile devices, comScore says
• Canadians no longer the biggest web addict, report shows

And we're adding video watching to our online fix, with a sharp hike in time spent watching in the past year. 

Working with metrics such as average monthly unique visitors for certain sites, comScore calculates Canadians visit an average of 80 sites and spend an average of 36.3 hours online on their desktop computers every month.

That compares with:

• Americans, who spend 35.2 hours a month online.
• Italians, who spend 33.5 hours.
• Britons, who spend 33 hours.

Canadians regained their place as the world's most engaged users after two years in second place, comScore says.

Once they're online, Canadians tend to linger a little longer in one place than some other big internet users. Our average number of pages visited is 3,238 a month, behind the click-happy Russians and Italians.

Mobile subscribers in Canada are up five per cent in the past year to 24 million. About four of every five mobile users have a smartphone.

Different uses of mobile

The most popular uses of smartphones were instant messaging, games and social media. Mobile users dominate social media such as Twitter and Snapchat, comScore says, and play a growing role in online shopping.

That's somewhat different from tablets, where the top usages included taking and managing photos, using social media and listening to internet radio.

Desktop use has flattened, up only one per cent, but most users say they use desktop computers in addition to other devices. But desktop still dominates for access to news and sports and online shopping.

Big users of video

Video consumption online is up a startling 36 per cent in the past year, with 43 per cent of users reporting they'd watched TV programs, 38 per cent saying they'd viewed news reports and 36 per cent  looking at entertainment or music videos.

Canadians spend 5.1 more hours watching video online than our American counterparts, and 73 per cent said they had access to online video, compared with 64 per cent of Americans.

"Faster connections and more powerful devices with larger screens are facilitating rapid growth of video on mobile, including longer-form content," comScore says in its report.