Canadians continue to hold the title of world champion Internet users.
ComScore released its annual take Wednesday on who's using the Internet. The organization also made comparisons among nations.
In the last quarter of 2010, Canadians were on the web an average of 43.5 hours per month. That is 8 hours more than our closest competitors – the Americans, then the British at 32.3 hours. The global average is 21 hours per month.
Behind that big picture there are some interesting developments. The fastest growing age group for Internet use is people over 55, which rose by 12 per cent.
Now, roughly one in every four Canadians who use the web regularly is over the age of 55. About 25 million Canadians are online.
However, web-use among those aged two to 17 is down four per cent. Use by the 18 to 34 age group did not increase at all and among the 35 to 54 age group there was only a one per cent rise in use.
The worldwide number of users was 1.3 billion, which is an increase of 200 million users.
And what were Canadians looking at while they were online? The number one thing was directories, such as Yahool!Directory, which lists websites by category.
There was also growth in newspaper and technology websites. Political websites saw the biggest growth.
Men and woman are using the Internet in equal numbers. Overall, social networking has hit a bit of a plateau in the last year while total email use has plummeted 28 per cent in the last year.
