Canadians Love the Internet, Eh?

According to The Canadian Press, comScore, the marketing intelligence service says Canadians are leading the way in hours spent online.

Canucks are spending an average of 2,500 minutes online per month which translates to over 41 hours, that’s an entire full-time work week spent surfing. And that’s apparently more than any other country in the world. Based on this data, it seems that Canadians are rapidly adopting the digital lifestyle and seem to be wildly passionate about online video, social media and Wikipedia.

If you take a look at how many Canadians are visiting YouTube, per capita, the great white north is smoking the rest of the world with 21 million Canadians visiting every month. That might not seem like a lot but considering the size of Canada’s population (34,238,000) that’s a lot of YouTubing.  YouTube is obviously deeply embedded in Canadian culture and it’s clear by the data.  Not only are Canadians hitting YouTube more (per capita), they’re also viewing an average of 147 videos each month: that’s 47 more than American users.

In the last month, Canada was ranked #10 on Socialbaker’s Facebook user list. It’s reported that Facebook has penetrated 51% of the Canadian population with 17,288,620 users.  When you view the penetration rates of the top 10 countries, Canada once again takes first place.  Americans came second in the top 10 contenders coming in a 46.98% penetration of the population.

While the exact number of Twitter users by country isn’t available yet, we know that Twitter has been gaining momentum in Canada throughout 2010. Twitter stated  “What we can share is that the number of Twitter accounts in Canada has increased by 75 per cent since the beginning of the year, and the number of daily tweets more than doubled..” And, we’re also seeing Canadians are using the user generated site Wikipedia more than any other country.  This data is based on 16 Wikipedia page views per month on average coupled with 217,000 Wikipedia edits a month.

The Canadian Press article highlights the fact that back in April of this year, comScore estimated that 68% of the Canadian population is online. The proof is in the pudding folks, Canadians are a group of highly progressive and tech savvy people.  Canucks might not get the hottest gadgets on release date but they’re poised to drive their gadgets online more than anyone else.  What do you think is the cause of this obsessive online behaviour.. Are Canadians just too cold to go outside?