Canadians are spending much more time online than people from other countries, with an increasing number of older users propelling that growth, according to a new study of Internet habits.

And Canadians are increasingly turning to political news and newspaper websites, while turning away from traditional email websites, such as Hotmail and Gmail, according to the numbers for 2010 released by comScore, an Internet-usage-monitoring company.

The study found that Canadians spent an average of 43.5 hours online per month in the fourth quarter of 2010, nearly double the average of 23.1 hours surfed by the 11 countries surveyed.

Canadians also visited on average 95.2 different websites a month in the quarter, 15 more than their U.S. counterparts, who viewed the second most, and 42 more than the worldwide average.

The number of Canadians who went online at least once, on average, per month in the quarter also grew by two per cent from 2009 — 24,989,000 unique visitors up from 24,602,000 in 2009.

People older than 55 spurred that increase, with 12 per cent more people in that age group reporting that they surfed than did in 2009. That demographic now comprises 19 per cent of Internet users, a larger segment than those 18 to 24 (10 per cent), 25 to 34 (18 per cent) and 35 to 44 (18 per cent).

Bryan Segal, vice-president of comScore, said the increase illustrates the "demographic divide" between those who have grown up using the Internet and the older generation.

"There's a lot of catching up in that demographic," he said of those 55 and older. "We see them doing a lot of social networking (and watching videos)."

The turn away from "email 1.0" — accessing email on websites such as Hotmail or Gmail — could be due to people using their smartphones to access email or using social-networking platforms, such as Facebook, to contact their friends.

"The death of email is not the storyline here," Segal said. "People are using several communication tools."

The types of websites Canadians visited remained much the same as in 2009. Directories/resources, such as Google, technology websites and news websites were the three most visited types of sites.

Newspaper sites increased their Canadian viewership by 16 per cent in 2010, while political news sites experienced a 46 per cent jump compared to 2009.

Coupon websites, such as SwarmJam or Groupon, attracted 36 per cent more visits in 2010 than the year previous.

The study also tracked Canadians' social networking, with Facebook (seven per cent), Twitter (11 per cent) and LinkedIn (35 per cent) all claiming significant increases in unique visitors.

MySpace (down 42 per cent) and blogging site WordPress (down 16 per cent) had their visitor counts shrink substantially.

Email websites, such as Hotmail and Gmail, also witnessed a 28 per cent decline in the number of daily visits.

The comScore study examined the online habits of residents in Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Germany.

The company provided a "panel" of 40,000 people in Canada with software that tracks their online usage. The information is weighted to make it reflect the population. The same method was also used in other countries that were tracked as well.

mbarber@postmedia.com

With files from Keith Bonnell