TORONTO - A new report confirms Canada is hanging on to its status as the most-engaged nation online.
And it's older folks, who were slower to embrace the web but are now online in much greater numbers, that are driving the growth of the Internet in this country.
According to measurement firm comScore, Canadians spent 43.5 hours online a month in the fourth quarter of 2010, which was nearly double the worldwide average and eight hours more than users in the U.S., the second-most plugged-in nation.
Canada's web population grew about two per cent in the last year to nearly 25 million, thanks to a 12 per cent growth spurt in the number of users aged 55 and older.
"This is a phenomenon we are seeing across the world," said comScore's Darrick Li.
"(Older users) are adopting the Internet for the first time. They didn't grow up with the Internet but they're using it more often.
"My grandma, for example, read an email for the first time the other day and before she'd never used a computer in her life."
The number of users in Canada aged two to 17 actually decreased by four per cent last year, users 18 to 34 stayed steady, and users 35 to 54 edged up by one per cent.
Social media usage by older users also spiked significantly.
The numbers of social media users in Canada aged 55 to 64 grew by 36 per cent. There was also a 34 per cent increase in the number of users older than 65 and their social media visits were up 45 per cent.
Overall, the number of Canadians using social media was up 13 per cent and in peak months, around 96 per cent of the online population visited a social networking site.
The most active times for social networking were during the colder months of the year, which could lend some credence to the theory that Canadians are world leaders online because of our wintry climate.
But Li said it would be difficult to directly correlate the weather to online usage.
"You can't directly link (the numbers) to something specific ... when we're looking at a population of 24 million it's really hard to pinpoint if there was something particular that changed usage from month to month," he said.
The report also noted Ontario has the most Internet users in Canada with 38 per cent of the online population, followed by 24 per cent in Quebec, 18 per cent in the Prairies, 13 per cent in British Columbia and seven per cent in Atlantic Canada.
