Lockdown has turned us into a nation of Zoom addicts
Britons spending record amount of time online as video apps and internet shopping boom
LOCKDOWN has dramatically changed the way people of all ages use the internet, an Ofcom study has revealed, as older people on Zoom and teenagers becoming addicted to Tiktok mean Britons are spending record amounts of time online.
The media regulator found people were now on the internet for more than a quarter of their waking hours, with adults spending on average an extra 37 minutes a day during lockdown.
The amount of time individuals spent online daily broke the four-hour mark for the first time in Ofcom’s research, going from three hours and 29 minutes on average in September to four hours and two minutes in April.
It comes as Ofcom said the pandemic was leaving a “lasting digital legacy” on the country and changing the UK’S internet habits and behaviour indelibly.
The survey of more than 3,000 people, aged 13 and up, found that the main drivers of increased usage were bored teenagers watching more videos online, older people video-calling their relatives and friends and people spending more time doing internet shopping.
When the Government imposed the lockdown on March 23, people were permitted to leave their house only once a day for exercise or for essential trips and socialise only with people from their own household.
As a result, Ofcom found a surging demand for videoconferencing software, such as Zoom. In February only 35 per cent of UK adults made a video call once a week, but by April that had soared to 71 per cent.
The largest increase was among the over-65s. Only 22 per cent of them made weekly video calls before lockdown compared with 61 per cent by April.
During that period, Zoom became by far the most popular video calling platform in lockdown. In December it only reached 498,000 people in the UK, making it the fourth most popular service, but by April its usage had surged to 13million people, making it by far the UK’S most popular platform.
Houseparty, which lets users play games with each other, also saw rocketing popularity, increasing its users in the UK from 175,000 to 4million.
Meanwhile, younger people flocked to sites such as the Chinese social network Tiktok, which lets users share short videos set to pop music. It increased its reach from 5.4 million to 12.9million people in the UK between January and April.
In April, more than half of 18 to 24-year-olds visited Tiktok, which has increasingly garnered high profile UK celebrity users from Kevin Pietersen, the former England cricketer, to Ant and Dec, the ITV presenters.
Over the last few months, Ofcom found Tiktok had become the third most popular social media site in terms of time spent, with users browsing it on average for 16 minutes a day, putting it just behind Snapchat at 18 minutes and Facebook at 31 minutes.
Young people also spent greater time on sites such as Youtube, with its 18 to 24-year-old users’ daily viewing time rising from 17 minutes a day in January to 32 minutes in April.
Yih-choung Teh, the Ofcom director of strategy and research, said: “Lockdown may leave a lasting digital legacy. Coronavirus has radically changed the way we live, work and communicate online, with millions of people using online video services for the first time.”