What Australians are surfing about on the net these days? Like the rest of the world, they were socialising via Facebook or enjoying the hottest clips posted on You Tube, according to a new study from Experian Hitwise.

The two hugely popular social media emerged as the dominant online attraction for most Aussies, ZDNet Australia reported, but Experian also suggested that the love affair appears to be waning at an alarming rate.

While the new Experian study showed that Facebook most definitely hold sway among Australians, in the same way that the site does in many countries around the world, the amount of time spent by Aussies interacting through the virtual community seems declining.

For the whole stretch of 12 months in January last year though last month, Facebook accounted for more than 50 percent of total net traffic observed in the country, Experian said.

However, an average Aussie Facebook member, according to the tech research firm, only lingered some 22 minutes during the whole period observed, in contrast to Facebook users from some countries who stayed for hours playing online games or simply living the virtual Facebook life.

You Tube, on the other hand, commanded some 23 percent of online traffic in the country, ZDNet said.

But the video-sharing site, owned and operated by Google, could only lure users to stick around for no more than 20 minutes, suggesting that Australians no longer count on the site as their likely choice for their visual entertainment load like they used to.

Who gets much of the attention this time? Experian declared the top attention-grabber the whole period as Tumblr, which ironically only placed number four in the social media popularity hierarchy.

The social networking site, according to Experian, was successful enough to convince users to stay for an average of 30 minutes at least, highlighting the incredible interest that the site has generated for the past 12 months, among Aussies at least.

Experian also noted on its study that while social networking activities appear to be declining last year, Google's search site has been steadily gaining more hits, with users most likely to remain on the same page for at least 17 more minutes.

Matt Glasner of Experian told ZDNet that search page usually remain open and idle at the same time, which explains the lingering interest spawned by Google Search among local users.

But Glasner also credited Google for enhancing the so-called user-experience attractions of its online offerings relative to its core search functions.

"As Google seeks to make search more personally relevant to specific users by integrating its social assets, this could have a marked shift on overall web-traffic rankings in Australia," Glasner said.

He cited the features deployed with Google+, the search engine giant's answer to Facebook, which has gained considerable following since its launch.

Experian is quick to add though that Google+ and other emerging social sites will not be able to topple Facebook anytime soon despite a number of them convincing users to spend more time navigating on the sites.

Glasner said their findings serve more as a prompt for social media sites "to pay close attention to their social-media marketing to ensure visitors can click and share content as easily as possible."