National Internet Observatory: "How Americans Spend Their Time Online"

I am a participant in Northeastern University's National Internet Observatory. I have a browser extenstion that allows them to record which sites I am visiting and every once in a while I complete a survey. Here is their first report.

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From the NIO:

Greetings, NIO contributors like you just made something new possible: a national picture of how Americans actually spend their time online, not what they say they do.

“How Americans Spend Their Time Online” is our first major report. Here's what NIO contributors revealed:

Five companies capture more than half of the time Americans spend online on desktop. Alphabet alone accounts for 35%. The rest of the top five, Meta, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon, bring it past 50%. Every other platform, service, and site shares what's left.

Social media and email are each 25% of online life. Together they account for half of everything.

AI tools have overtaken news. ChatGPT and similar platforms: 2.9% of online time. News: 2.5%. That gap didn't exist two years ago.

The web is deeply age-segregated. Older Americans spend more than a third of their time on email; younger Americans spend 13% on YouTube and 3% on AI tools. The internet looks nothing alike across generations.

This is the research NIO contributors make possible, not estimates or surveys, but direct measurement.