YNOT EUROPE – According to a recent report from Experian Hitwise, UK internet users prefer social networking to surfing porn. The gap between the two content categories is not extreme, but January’s statistics represent the first time social networks have outpaced entertainment since Hitwise began tracking such data.

The report indicates the 9,000 social networks Hitwise tracks, taken together, accounted for 12.46 percent of all online traffic in the UK in January. The figure represents about 2.4 billion website hits, or one-eighth of all visits to all internet sites combined. Facebook outdistanced its brethren by a significant margin, snagging 56 percent of all visits to social networks.

On the other hand, porn and other entertainment websites garnered only 12.18 percent of all January web traffic.

Evidently, “network” is an apt description for the way traffic moves through sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to one Hitwise analyst.

“While social networks of course compete amongst themselves for users, many of those users have a presence on multiple networks,” Hitwise Research Director Robin Goad wrote on the company’s blog. “One in every eight people leaving a social network visits another one immediately after. Facebook, for example, is a key source of traffic for many smaller social networks, while almost a fifth of people leaving Twitter go on to visit another social network.”

The dominance of social networking likely will increase, judging by January’s 17 percent increase in the number of social networking sites Hitwise tracks. In addition, users spent more time on social networking sites than ever before: An average session now runs 22 minutes.

Goad had advice for e-commerce and entertainment websites seeking to reclaim market share from social networks.

“Social networks have become a key source of traffic from many websites, particularly those distributing content and chasing ‘eyeballs,’” he wrote. “But transactional websites … still rely primarily on search for their traffic and therefore sales. Successful transactional websites will be those that learn to harness the power of social networks, driving traffic through to their own websites.”