In my last blog about the 72 million people that are into cross-border ecommerce I mentioned that the average Facebooker spends 25.4 min/day on Facebook. That is a staggering 12.7 hrs a month, equaling over 1.5 workdays! That seems to be a lot of time wasted, or shall we say, repurposed. Assuming that lots of the Facebook time actually happens at work, could we argue that the phenomenal growth of the social networks actually contributed to the decline of the economy?

Lets have a look at what Alexa says on how much time visitors spend on the other networks: YouTube 23.3 min/day, MySpace 21 min/day, LinkedIn 6.7 min/day, Twitter 9.3 min/day (I didn’t add Bebo, as Bebo users are too young to work). When you multiply that time spent with their estimated user numbers (FB 200m, YT 200m, MS 150m, TW 30m, LI 50) assuming that 33% is active, and 50% is in the USA, you get a staggering 5332 manyears per day repurposed to social networks. Assuming that 75% of the social networking is actually spent at work, and a USA GDP/capita of $30k, you are looking at $150m lost in real productivity per day. On an annual basis that means a lost productivity of around $55B, or around 0.38% of the USA 2008 GDP. Given the annualized Q4 2008 contraction of US GDP of 6.2%, you could argue that social networks caused around 5% of the recession (assuming that the social networks did not generate lots of GDP). No wonder that companies are increasingly blocking IPs of social networks.

Now stop reading this blog and go back to work!

Catch you later

Andre