Bad news for bosses: Advertising Age claimed earlier this week that office time spent on non-work blogs adds up to the equivalent of a cumulative 2.3 million jobs per year. Ad Age estimated that 35 million workers, or one in four people in the work force, visit blogs and spend an average of 3.5 hours a week on blogs. That's 9 percent of a 40-hour workweek.
Here's worse news for bosses: it's not just blogs that employees are digging into while supposedly at work. Your staffers are shopping, emailing, IM'ing, and surfing up a storm on the company dime. They are planning vacations, researching cars, and hunting for apartments from 9 to 5.
A quick tour through the eMarketer eStat database comes up with dozens of measures pointing to rampant personal use of the internet on company time.
An America Online/Salary.com survey published earlier this year offers the broadest (bleakest?) picture of wasted time. Note that younger employees -- presumably those most familiar with all the distractions and temptations the web has to offer -- are the biggest online time wasters. Those born between 1980 and 1985 log nearly two hours a day. That's right: roughly 25 percent of the day is wasted.
IM'ing is probably a major culprit for these younger users. A survey by Akonix found that personal IM use eats up hours a day for many users. Almost half of those surveyed said that IM'ing took up to 30 minutes of the day.
Web surfing is another time consumer. A Harris Interactive poll commissioned by Websense found that a staggering 51 of employees said they spent between one and five hours a week on non-work sites.
My favorite group in this poll is the brutally honest 11 percent who admitted that they spend at least 11 hours surfing for fun while on the job. Hats off to these enterprising slackers, who doubtless will develop carpal tunnel syndrome from repeated use of the alt-tab command to launch work-related apps whenever the boss comes around.
And then there is email. Statistics from the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future found that nearly two-thirds of adults check personal email at work. That was based on data from 2003, so it is likely the number is higher today.
When is the most common time for these workers to check their mail? Sorry, boss: all day long. That's according to a poll by Opinion Research Corp. for AOL.
What with all the IM'ing, emailing, blog reading and writing, and general surfing going on at work, who can find time to shop while on the company dime? More than half of us, actually, according to this Websense survey. (And that doesn't count the 39 percent who said they visited auction sites.)
In fact, one of the key allures of online shopping is that it can be done while at work, according to a survey by Forrester Research.
Bosses, being human, are doubtless wasting plenty of time online, too. Perhaps that's why so many of them don't mind that employees are doing a bit of shopping while on the clock. Note that of the four regions in this Harris/Yahoo! poll, only in the Northeast did a majority of bosses say it is not acceptable to shop at work-and that was a slim majority.
This virtual epidemic of work time wasted presents a clear lesson for marketers -- don't ignore workplace consumers! Go after them during the day. They're roaming the web in force from 9 to 5. Just don't expect them to listen to audio files -- they've muted their speakers.
Ezra Palmer is editorial director of eMarketer, the "first place to look" for market research information related to the Internet, e-business, and online marketing.
