UK now spends more time browsing on mobile than on desktop

According to eMarketers’ Time Spent with Media forecast, UK adults this year will spend 1 hour and 59 minutes a day browsing on their mobile devices. That’s one minute each day more than they spend browsing via their desktop or laptop computers. There’s a first!

Emarketer expects the margin to widen, predicting that mobile browsing time will grow to about 2 hours and 14 minutes per day by 2019.

If we look back at 2014, adults in the UK spent an average of 2 hours and 10 minutes browsing on their computer, against 1 hour and 13 minutes on their mobile.  It’s clear that the gap is narrowing year on year.

The forecast also shows that people will spend 2 hours and 45 minutes per day with mobile-only devices including tablets, an increase of 8% on 2016.

According to eMarketer, this shift in digital consumption behaviour is being driven by an increase in digital video viewing, particularly via social media and various messaging apps.

In 2017 UK adults will spend an average of 31 minutes per day watching digital video on a mobile device. This sees a 13.5% increase since 2016.

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Source: eMarketer

And what about social?

Currently we don’t have specific predictions for time spent on social media solely in the UK, but we can get an overall idea by looking at this infographic produced by GlobalWebIndex.

As it stands, one of the most common reasons for using social media is to kill some spare time. Whether it’s waiting for the train, standing in the queue at the kiosk or waiting on your other half to pay for his/her entire new wardrobe – we’re all guilty of checking our feed that hasn’t changed since at least 3 minutes ago. Hashtag bored.

This gives us some context for the rising figures in the chart; globally, digital consumers say they are now spending an average of 2 hours and 15 minutes per day on social networks and messaging, up 45 minutes from 2012. Does that mean we have more spare time than we did 5 years ago? I’m certain this is not case.

COTD_11_Sept_2017

Source: GlobalWebIndex

By demographics, it’s women and younger age groups who seem to have taken the lead, but it’s quite clear that all groups of internet users are now dedicating a significant chunk of their daily online activities to social media and messaging.

The shift of internet activities to mobile is undoubtedly having a major impact here, with many users switching in-between various apps throughout the day.

So where do we go from here? If you haven’t been targeting mobile users in your latest campaigns then here’s your wake-up call. And on another note: video, video, VIDEO.  Now put that phone away, your train is here.  The train of thought.

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