Canadians spent 25% of their waking hours online last year, which tallied up to 41 billion hours (plus another seven billion hours spent with connected TV), according to Comscore’s 2024 Year in Review. The report is a wrap-up of key insights that defined digital in 2024, with a look ahead at Canada’s digital landscape in 2025.

The report also found Canadians spent 66% of the time on mobile devices, making it the most popular category, followed by desktop (19%) and connected TV (15%). The use of mobile devices, particularly smartphones, has steadily increased over the last several years, while desktop usage showed incremental growth YoY. Although mobile is strong, Canada is still one of the top five markets with the most desktop-exclusive usage.

The top mobile apps ranked by unique visitors has YouTube in the number one spot for those aged 18 through 34, with Spotify coming in second. Facebook leads with the 55-plus demo, with Google Search coming in second.

Video consumption continues to increase with a 9% YoY increase in minutes from November 2023 to November 2024. YoY views were up by 10% at the same time.

Bell Media leads in reach of Canadian video content, both desktop and mobile, with 12 million unique visitors last year. CBC Radio-Canada followed with eight million unique visitors and Pelmorex with three million.

Adoption of connected TV use grew 5% in Canada and just 1% in the U.S. YouTube connected TV time spent continues to grow around the world with Canada seeing a 9% jump in time spend with connected TV last year.

Corus video content drew 20 million unique visitors in 2024, followed by CBC Radio-Canada with 18 million, Bell Media with 13 million unique visitors and Rogers with five million.

Spotify is the streaming audio leader in Canada, clocking in with a 16% increase in hours spend listening in 2024 for a total of 412 million hours.

Canadian consumers are spending a substantial amount of time on digital platforms for both entertainment and communications. A whopping 10 billion hours were spent with entertainment sites and apps last year.

Connected TV, email and online services, and social media each logged in seven billion hours spent by Canadians in 2024 with gaming sites and apps drawing five billion hours.

Canadian news and TV broadcasters alone reached 98% of Canadians 18-plus, or 29 million, with 1.3 billion views and 3.9 billion minutes of usage. CTV News drew 13 million unique visitors via desktop and mobile devices. CBC News attracted 13 million and Postmedia 12 million. CBC News was most popular on social media with an audience of 7.5 million. Global News drew 3.9 million and CP24 brought in three million visitors.

The report also covered banking in Canada, including the top banking advertisers, social banking and top players in Canadian digital finance. Looking at the retail category, Comscore ranked retailers and selected subcategories pointing to Factormeals.ca, Fabletics.ca and Saxxunderwear.ca as the top three fastest growing retailers, followed by Audible.com and Wearfigs.com to round out the top five. Amazon leads the list of retail properties on desktop and mobile, with Walmart and Loblaws at numbers two and three, respectively.

Reddit experienced the highest audience growth of social media entities with a 26% increase in 2024. Discord’s audience grew by 10% last year, Instagram rose 11% and WhatsApp increased 8%. Facebook brought in the most unique visitors across age groups last year with a 94% increase. Bytedance followed with 86% growth and Reddit with 62%.

Canadian sponsorship on social media was led by McDonalds Canada which sponsored the most social content last year although Gillette had the most engagement on sponsored content. Gen Z is also extensively covered in the report including platform use, top mobile apps, and social media habits. The section on use of artificial intelligence reports on platform choices, the AI tools used with each device and the growing role of AI in everyday life.

The data was garnered from the Comscore Video Metrix Multi-Platform and CTV Device-Level, Total Audience, from January 2024 to December 2024 in Canada.