A new report from comScore measuring spent by users on various Internet sites found that Microsoft is way ahead of the pack.
A total of 3.920 billion hours were spent by users on Microsoft sites in September 2009, which is approximately 14.5% of the total online time by all users in that month. Of this, nearly 70% was on Windows Live Messenger.
In contrast only 2.512 billion hours were spent on Google sites, which is about 9.3% of the market share.
Google can take consolation in the fact that the usage of their sites has grown by 48% when compared with the usage in September 2008. Microsoft has grown by 44% in the same period.
Yahoo! sites, which accounted for 1.699 billion hours of online use have actually lost 14% in the same time frame.
The greatest (but not really surprising) growth was shown by Facebook. They clocked 1.387 billion hours in September 2009 compared to 474 billion hours in September 2008, which is a growth of 193%.
Graph showing change in user hours clocked on Top 4 Internet sites
A total of 27 billion hours were spent on the internet by 1.2 billion users over 15 years of age. The total population accessing the internet has grown by 20% in the last 1 year and is growing further.
Analysis of time spent online on a regional basis shows that Microsoft sites are largely preferred in Europe (16.8%), Latin America (35.9%), Middle East and Africa (33.1%), while Yahoo! has a sizable fan following in North America (11.2%) and the Asia-Pacific region (7.9%). Google sites are prominent in Latin America (19.4%), Middle East and Africa (9.7%), Europe (9.6%), and North America (9.1%).
