People Are Spending More Time On Their Phones Than Ever

Analyzing the share of digital minutes spent across all devices in the US, smartphones account for 62 percent share followed by desktops at 29 percent and tablets at 9 percent.

Mobile usage is becoming more and more app oriented.

According to the comscore report, as of December 2017, an average user spends 88 percent of the time spent on mobile devices on apps while browsers account for only 12 percent of mobile usage.

As you can clearly see, app consumption overwhelmingly dominates the time spent on mobile devices.

Moreover, The number of websites and apps that managed to reach one in ten people increased by 2 percent in the US. This positive year on year change in reach over the last one year indicates that going digital is the best decision you are going to take for the future prospects of your business.

Smartphones have emerged as the most dominant digital platform.

The digital minutes spent per user across different platforms is unevenly distributed. Smartphones have the highest share of digital minutes at 62 percent

The mobile only audience in the US is pretty low with huge overlapping among both the sectors, the audience clearly prefers to access the internet via smartphones more often than they do via desktops. The desktop digital minutes share stands at 29 percent followed by tablets at 9 percent.

People are spending more time on their phones than ever.

There is an increase in the share of digital minutes spent on the smartphone on a year on year basis. The digital consumption increased from 54.5 percent at the beginning of 2016 to 61.9 percent at the end of 2017.

The consumption of digital minutes per person is more than double on mobile phones compared to desktops. An average person spends 2,000 minutes working on the desktop, the minutes spent per person on mobile devices surmounts to 5,400.

Top app categories

Four categories of apps account for more than three-fourth share of total app minutes. Entertainment is the most popular app category followed by social media, games and instant messaging. Not only are these app categories dominating the app market, they have just gotten more popular in the 2016-17 period.

As per the December 2017 stats, entertainment apps account for 30 percent of mobile minutes which is a 11 percent increase from the previous year. Social media apps contribute to 27 percent of the mobile minutes, a 20 percent increase from the last year. Gaming apps are at 15 percent which is a 38 percent increase from last year. Instant messaging apps at 6 percent which is a whooping 98 percent increase from the previous year.

Together, these four app categories form 78 percent of mobile app minutes in US.

Additionally, three subcategories- multimedia (17 percent), social networking (17 percent) and instant messaging (5 percent) account for more than a third of all digital time.

Top apps by reach

Facebook, YouTube, Google search, Facebook messenger and Snapchat were the top 5 apps by reach in the US.

Upon analysis of the four social media app minutes, Facebook emerged highest with 70 percent share, followed by Instagram at 16 percent, Snapchat at 12 percent and Twitter at 2 percent.

Analysis of share of minutes by instant messaging apps, Facebook messenger enjoys an overwhelming majority in the US with it accounting for 96 percent of mobile minutes. WhatsApp messenger and WeChat accounted for 3 percent and 1 percent respectively.

Video consumption trends

The content consumption trends, quite popular in New York, are also changing with video consumption increasing everyday.

There is an phenomenal overall increase in video consumption since the past one year. The digital video growth recorded over a period of a year shows 46 percent increase in desktop video viewership and 41 percent increase in mobile video viewership which is huge considering the short span of time.

Mobile phones are the platform of choice for video streaming

Mobile phones are the preferred device of choice for streaming of videos. The study shows that 68 percent video viewership takes place on the mobile devices while 32 percent takes place on desktops.

So if you are looking for pointers about how to engage your audience, we would recommend using the videos to your advantage. Make use of it in the website content or go for in app videos, both are great strategies to ensure a high user engagement.