77% of Brits online – more than half the online population now on Facebook?

Sep 7, 2010 by Dirk Singer

According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), 38.3 million of us – or 77% of the population aged 16+ – are now online (via emarketer). If we tie those into the recent Facebook stats, that would mean that with 27.8 million accounts,72.5% of the UK Internet population is now on Facebook..sounds very high and some of it must be due to duplicate or more likely dormant accounts but it would be realistic to say that it is 50%+ if not 2/3.

Some highlights from the table above: Reading or downloading online news and newspapers is as popular among 16-24 year olds (52%) as among 45-54 year olds (51%). In other words newspapers in print form may be dying, but the news certainly isn’t.

As expected however, 16-24 year olds lead in playing or downloading games, images or music (61%), posting messages to chat sites, blogs or newspapers (75%) and uploading self created content (50%).

Apparently more than 17 million people now get TV from the Web, that’s not down to YouTube but to services such as BBC iPlayer, confirming what the earlier Ofcom report showed, that by and large we want to watch much of the same sort of material (with the same production values) on the PC as we do on the box.

Finally the ONS stats confirm the new online generational gap occurring at around 65, something that was also shown by the recent Pew Report into older Web surfers in the US. The ONS estimates that 3/5 of people aged 65+ have never gone online.