Nigerian children spend more time than others in over 10 countries watching videos and listening to music online, the latest report by a global cybersecurity company, Kaspersky Lab, has shown.
However, children from other African countries like South Africa, Egypt, and Algeria, were among the frontrunners in their visits to sites for music and video content between May 2018 and May this year.
Kaspersky Lab, which got its findings by scanning the content of web pages that children try to access, said children in Africa more than anywhere else visit sites related to software, audio and video.
Kaspersky Lab identified their favourites sites as youtube.com, dvdvideosoft.com, dropbox.com, and play.google.com.
Globally, analysts at Kaspersky Lab said they observed a growth in children’s online search for content on software, audio, and video, which rose to 32.75 per cent from 22.4 per cent.
This, according to the report, was followed by a growing interest in electronic commerce and news content online.
“At the same time, the share of the software, audio, video category rose to 32.75 per cent against 22.4 per cent last year. Electronic commerce ranks third; compared with the data for 2017-2018, the popularity of online stores among children increased dramatically, from 2.83 per cent to 14.18 per cent. Children have started accessing news resources more frequently: Last year, this category accounted for slightly less than one per cent, while this year’s figure stands at 8.78 per cent,” the cybersecurity company said.
Regarding visits to alcohol, tobacco and drugs-related sites, the report said children online search dwindled drastically compared to the previous year.
“The share of computer game-related sites was 3.01 per cent, which is 1.98 p.p. lower than the previous reporting period. Meanwhile, the share of adult content sites climbed to 2.08 per cent, which is up 1.34 percentage points on last year (0.74 per cent). The share of sites in the alcohol, tobacco, and drugs category collapsed, amounting to 0.64 per cent (6.32 per cent in the last reporting period).”
Kaspersky said kids in China spend more time than others globally watching videos and listening to music (69.36 per cent) same as last year.“In some countries, children’s time spent on listening to music and watching videos shot up. The figure grew exponentially in Saudi Arabia (from 0.38 per cent to 51.34 per cent), which could be related to the launch of Spotify in the region, Egypt (from 11.03 per cent to 40.28 per cent), Mexico (from 10.65 per cent to 42.37 per cent), the UAE (from 9.17 per cent to 23.29 per cent), and Brazil (from 13.53 per cent to 27.44 per cent). In all these countries, the most popular site in this category is youtube.com.”