Almost everybody has to spend a huge chunk of their lives on the internet nowadays to do everything from work to socializing to shopping. But people in some countries are spending way more time, on average, on the internet than others. And Indonesians rank up there among the top.
That’s according to the results of the latest 2019 Global Digital Reports from We Are Social and Hootsuite, which gather data on a wide variety of internet trends across the world. One of those reports ranks countries based on the average amount of time their citizens spend online. And based on their data, Indonesians are plugged in to the interwebz for a whopping 8 hours and 36 minutes per day, on average.
That’s significantly above the report’s global average of 6 hours and 42 minutes per day and puts Indonesia at #5 in terms of all countries included in the report.
Interestingly, two of our Southeast Asian neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines, average even longer internet days, with Filipinos topping the list with a crazy 10 hours and 2 minutes per day average.
What might be even crazier is that the Japanese supposedly only spend an average of 3 hours and 45 minutes online per day (well, people like Japan’s cyber-security minister who has ‘never used a computer’ could be bringing their number down a lot).
However, these results need to be taken with a big byte of salt, as they so often do. In this case, the data is based on “broad survey data” of internet users age 16-64 (in Q2 and Q3 of 2018), meaning the time measurements were self-reported and not derived from actual usage data. It also means the large number of Indonesians who have no access to or chose not to use the internet are not represented (which, as the Global Digital Report data shows, is about 50% of the population).
However, one could also argue that people taking a survey would likely underestimate the amount of time they spend online.
There has been previous data to suggest that Indonesians have an especially intense connection to the internet, with Indonesians being named as one of the largest and most active user groups on Instagram and Twitter.
