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Media consumed on mobile connected devices accounted for just under a fifth of all time spent consuming media in 2016, according to media agency Zenith's Media Consumption Forecasts report, published yesterday. This will grow to 26%, or over one-fourth of all time spent, in 2019. On average, people will spend 122 minutes a day using the mobile Internet via browsers and apps, compared with just ten minutes in 2010. (See Mobile Cannibalizing Other Media, Finds Latest Zenith Media Consumption Forecast.)
While mobile media consumption has grown rapidly, at an average rate of 44% per year since 2010, it has also helped increase media consumption overall. The average person has been spending about 2% more time consuming media across all device/channels every year since 2010. Not all of the time now used for mobile media consumption is additive however -- some of it has come at the expense of other media (newspapers, television, outdoor media, cinema and so on).
Still, these "traditional" media account for a clear majority of time spent: 69% of global media consumption in 2017 will be with traditional media, an average of 316 minutes per day. That is 13% down from 364 minutes in 2010, but still clearly important for the average consumer.
This estimate also doesn't account for traditional media operations that have shifted to the Internet -- like a traditional broadcaster who is now supplementing viewership on broadcast TV with a streaming video catch-up service on the Internet.
Traditional, linear TV continues to account for the most time spent, averaging 170 minutes per day 2017. Internet usage, across all devices, is catching up though -- consumers will spend an average of 140 minutes per day using it this year. And the gap will narrow rapidly, with Zenith predicting that it will fall from 30 minutes in 2017 to just seven minutes in 2019.
Zenith also forecasts that the increases in media consumption are now set to slow down, as mobile media growth itself slows. Growth in mobile Internet usage slowed to 25% in 2016, well below the 43% increase in 2015. Zenith predicts 2017 will bring still slower growth, at 17%.
This will also affect the growth in time spent consuming all media: Media consumption will be more or less flat moving forward, growing by less than 1% annually through 2019.
This edition of Zenith's Media Consumption Forecasts surveys changing patterns of media consumption since 2010, and forecasts how the amount of time people allocate to different media will change between 2017 and 2019, in 71 countries across the world.
— Aditya Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation
