Brits top internet addicts league in Europe

People in the UK spend more time online than any other country in Europe, according to figures released in a ComScore report on Thursday.

The report, which looked at Euorpean internet usage for December 2011, found that average UK users spent nearly 36 hours online during the period, edging ahead of Turkey with 33.7 hours and the Netherlands with 32.7 hours.

"The Russian internet audience continued to be the largest audience by users in Europe with nearly 53.3 million users accessing the internet in December 2011. The UK continued to show the highest engagement, with users spending an average of 35.6 hours online during the month, " ComScore said in a statement.

Worldwide, the report found that on average people spent 24.4 hours online in December. Bottom of the list for hours spent online was Austria and Italy, with 15 and 17.7 hours respectively.

In addition to spending the most time online, UK users were also in second spot for the 'pages viewed' rankings; with an average of 3297 pages per person. However, this figure was slightly lower than that of Turkey — which had an average of 3974 pages per person — despite the UK audience spending more time online overall.

The report also found that, while the UK only had the fourth highest number of people using internet banking — with a 53.2 percent reach of the UK internet audience — it had the second highest number of unique users. The Netherlands had the highest reach, at 66.3 percent.

In terms of unique users, the UK took the second spot with just under 20 million logging on during December. France took the top spot with 25.8 million unique users.