Pinoys spend 10 hours weekly websurfing at home

Though the majority of Filipinos still access the Internet through Internet cafes, the trend is slowly shifting toward more private and intimate usage at home, according to the 2011 edition of the Net Index study released by Yahoo! Philippines and Nielsen Media. Between 2009 and 2011, the Net Index study of 1,500 respondents from across the country showed that Filipinos accessing the Web from Internet cafes declined from 71 percent in 2009 to only 66 percent this year. In contrast, the percentage of those with private Internet access at home has gone up from just 27 percent in 2009 to 35 percent this year. This shift contributed to the country's 30 percent overall Internet penetration rate, which has remained stable over the past three years since the study was first conducted in 2009. Infrastructure and legislation Jay Bautista, managing director for media at the Nielsen Company Philippines, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday that the lower tariff rates for home broadband subscription coupled with the declining cost in hardware are contributing factors to this shift. "The [telco] infrastructure is now more supportive of home-based usage. Providers are also doing a lot of bundling with their offers," Bautista said. Arlene Amarante, Yahoo! Philippines' country ambassador, added that certain regulations in some localities might have also contributed to this shift. "Government regulation also has something to do with this. There are a lot of local governments that limit the amount of time spent by students in Internet cafes," Amarante said. Due to this shift, Nielsen's Bautista said Filipinos are now spending a longer time online, as indicated by the survey results which showed that the average weekly time spent surfing the web at home increased from just 4.8 hours in 2009 to 10.4 hours this year. In contrast, the rate for Internet cafes made only a slight jump from 4.5 hours in 2009 to 5.5 hours in 2011. In the same manner, Bautista said the entertainment value of content found in the Internet is boosting Internet usage in the country. According to the study, playing or downloading international music (68 percent), local music (65 percent), interesting videos or photos (59 percent) and online games (56 percent) are among the top usage patterns among Filipino netizens. Social media outpacing email, IM But despite these high usage patterns, the Yahoo!-Nielsen study found that social networking remains to be the top application accessed by Pinoys over the web. Increasingly, social networking sites are becoming the Internet usage pathway where new users get acquainted with the web. "At least 39 percent said social networking sites have been a starting point for their online experience," Bautista said. Additionally, at least 8 in 10 online Filipinos said they accessed social networking sites in the past month, compared to only half in the 2010 edition of the study. Social media also outpaced email and instant messaging in terms of online usage, as email were accessed only by 64 percent of the respondents and instant messaging by 69 percent in the past month. "Communication is at the heart of the landscape online," Bautista said. "We've seen that users prefer social networking for one-to-many type of communication, while e-mail and instant messaging are perfect for one-to-few types of communication." With this exponential growth in social networking in the country, Bautista said that they are seeing an emerging trend called "selective socialization" among users. "There are two tracks emerging—there is fragmentation across multiple platforms where users use different social networks for different types of connections," he explained. "There is also the cataloging on a single platform, where users use 'buckets' to organize their digital profiles," he added. Bautista said this is like building walls between different platforms, and is becoming evident in social networking environments because of privacy concerns, a factor which 66 percent of those surveyed is constantly weary of. "These walls will be built to control information [shared across different platforms]," he added. — TJD, GMA News