Average person in Wales spends less time online than Scots or English

The average person in Wales is online for almost four hours a day, new research has shown – a shorter time period than those in Scotland or England.

People in Wales spent an average of three hours and 43 minutes online – while the Scots and English spend four hours 18 minutes and three hours 59 minutes online a day respectively.

Ofcom polled more than 10,000 people across the UK about their internet habits, with 5% of the sample coming from Wales. They found that Wales had the highest number of households with no internet access at all, at almost one in ten.

While 9% of households in Wales had no internet access, that figure was just 1% for Northern Ireland, 6% for England and 7% for Scotland. A full 10% in Wales didn’t use the internet at all.

Wales however had the highest percentage of internet users who got their news from a regional news site, with 60% accessing Wales Online, compared to the 42% who accessed the Daily Record in Scotland and 37% who accessed the Belfast Telegraph in Northern Ireland.

“Most of the top ten news websites and apps for the whole of the UK were equally popular across each UK nation,” the report said.

“But the high reach of Wales Online (the second most visited online news service in Wales), Belfast Live (second in Northern Ireland) and the Daily Record (fourth in Scotland) shows the importance of news tailored to audiences in each of the UK nations.”

The people of Wales were also the least likely to spend time on Twitter.

Twitter appears in the top ten most-visited organisations for Scotland (65%) and Northern Ireland (59%) but not for England (62%) or Wales (58%).