U.K. Housewives Online Most

A new survey on Web use shows that UK housewives spend the most time online — even more than the Chinese.

A new survey by global marketing information group TNS has asked questions of some 27,000 people in 16 countries to find out about web use and also the faith of respondents in online and traditional media – and it’s turned up a few interesting results.

Residents of Asian countries spend the greatest amount of their leisure time online, headed by the Chinese, who spend 44% of their free time on the Web, with under 25s there claiming 50% of their leisure time is spent online (against a 36% international average). In the Nordic countries online time claims the lowest percentage of leisure time, just 15% in Denmark.

But the accolade for greatest amount of online time went to UK housewives, who occupy 47% of leisure time online.
Of those who’ve met someone they befriended online, the Germans lead with a staggering 76% saying yes, although across all countries it was a surprisingly high 60%.

In the UK only 23% trusted newspapers as sources of information, although 40% gave a lot of trust to online news.