Americans enjoy middle-of-the-night web surfing more than Europeans do

Here’s an interesting bit of research.

A look at the graph below, put together by the team at Arbor networks (via the Internet Observatory), highlights a number of interesting facts.

To note, the times below are in EDT and so therefore Europe is 5 hours ahead. Also, the y-axis shows the amount of time online as a percentage – with 100% being the peak.

The Facts:

• Unsurpringly, both show regular, daily cyclical traffic patterns with Internet traffic dropping at night and growing during the day.
• We all share the same morning and evening Internet addiction: On average, European traffic starts picking up around 5am GMT  and similarly US traffic takes off around the same time at 7am EDT. Internet traffic also reaches its peaks in the early evening (7pm GMT  in Europe and 10pm EDT / 7 pm PDT in the US).

• North American’s generally don’t surf over dinner: Unlike European traffic, US daily Internet percentages take a small dip in the early evening between 6pm and 10pm EDT. In contrast, Europe traffic keeps climbing through the evening until a marked 9pm GMT / 11pm CEST drop off. Of course, Europeans tend towards later (and longer) dinner hours than their North American counterparts.
• Europeans don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet during the night. In contrast to North America, European traffic plummets much more steeply and reaches a lower daily minimum than US traffic (US traffic never drops below 50% whereas Europe declines more more than 60% from its peak). Apparently, North American Internet users stay up later and use the Internet longer (next blog post we’ll explore what they’re doing on the Internet late at night). b