What Users Spend More than Half Their Time Online Doing ...

According to a four year study by the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index (the OPA's IAI -- why is it associations crave acronyms?), the share of time that users spend with content online has increased 37% since 2003.

Some factors discussed in the findings:

• A more accessible, and much faster, Internet is driving increased overall time spent online.
• The increased popularity of video is leading to more time being spent with online content.
• The improvement in search allows consumers to more easily and quickly find the exact content they are looking for, increasing the likelihood they will engage more deeply with that content.
• The Web simply offers far more content than it did even four years ago, increasing content's share of time.
• The rise of instant messaging (IM) as a key communications tool has been a factor in communication's reduction in share of time. IM is a more efficient communications vehicle than email.

So while yesterday I made the point that the value of content ownership is falling -- surely serving content is the leading way to attract engagement and attention online.

I would like to learn more about the study -- how they separate content from communication (that line is definitely blurring with UGC) -- and it would be useful if the next study bifurcated traditional content from user-generated content.