The Digital 2021 report, just published by We Are Social and Hootsuite, analyzes the new challenges and opportunities arising from the pandemic. According to the report, digital in 2021 will be anything but “old-fashioned business.” And it is that 2020 has made ‘connected technology’ an even more essential part of people’s lives.
The first conclusion to be drawn from the report is that social media, e-commerce, streaming content, and video games experienced significant growth in the past 12 months across the globe.
Mobile, Internet and social media
A total of 5.22 billion people use a mobile phone today, which is equivalent to 66.6% of the world’s population. Unique mobile users have grown by 1.8% (93 million) since January 2020, while the total number of mobile connections has increased by 72 million (0.9%) to reach a total of 8.02 billion in early 2021.
On the Internet, 4.66 billion people worldwide use the Internet as of January 2021, an increase of 316 million (7.3%) since this time last year. Global Internet penetration is now 59.5%.
Finally, the report highlights that there are now 4.20 billion users of social networks worldwide. This figure has grown by 490 million in the last 12 months, which shows a year-on-year growth of more than 13%. The number of social media users now amounts to more than 53% of the world’s total population.
GWI data shows that the daily average on social media has increased by more than half an hour over the past 5 years. The typical user now spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media every day, which equates to roughly one full waking day of their life each week.
Spain highlights
Together, the world’s social media users will spend a total of 3.7 trillion hours on social media in 2021, which is equivalent to more than 420 million years of human existence combined. Spain is below the world average, with 1 hour and 54 minutes of time dedicated to social networks every day. If we talk about time spent on the Internet throughout the day, in Spain we would talk about an average of 6 hours and 11 minutes a day, as seen in the graph.
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