Americans are spending 198 minutes per day using mobile apps this year, compared with 168 minutes watching television, according to new research.
The study, from Flurry, indicates that entertainment and content apps are breaking into top-grossing charts, with Netflix, Pandora and HBO Now among those highlighted.
Key findings:
• The average US consumer spends nearly 198 minutes using mobile apps compared to 168 minutes watching TV each day. This excludes time spent inside mobile web browsers.
• The inclusion of web browsing on mobile devices boosts the daily average up to 220 minutes.
• Over the last three years, TV viewing has stagnated. On the other hand time spent in apps has increased from 126 minutes per day on average in Q2 2013 to 198 minutes in Q2 2015.
The Flurry research suggests is that consumers are more likely to expect video content to be presented in an app format, highlighting why pay-TV companies are increasingly offering their own mobile services to subscribers.
.
Apps Are Gaining Ground
Apps now reign supreme as the top media channel in the United States, even without the help of the mobile browser. For the first time ever, time spent inside mobile applications by the average US consumer has exceeded that of TV.
This year, it’s estimated that revenues from in-app purchases will exceed advertising revenues for the first time.
In 2014, App stores generated $21B USD in sales on a worldwide basis, while the mobile ads industry generated $23B USD during the same time. This year, we expect in-app purchases to exceed $33B USD and the ads industry (excluding search) is expected to generate $31B USD.
The average US consumer is spending 198 minutes per day inside apps compared to 168 minutes on TV.
While time-spent on TV hasn’t decreased, it is hard to say how much of that time is actual watching, versus having background noise to the plethora of apps being actively consumed on mobile devices.
In the media industry, time-spent is the ultimate metric and if we simply look at the chart above, there is no point for analysts to debate the long term prospects of the cable industry.
App Users Pay For Content
Since its launch in 2008 and until this year, the Apple App Store and its Android counterpart’s top grossing charts have been dominated by the gaming industry.
But this year, many media & entertainment apps such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Spotify and Pandora have ranked well in the top grossing charts and have ended the gaming industry’s de-facto monopoly on the App Store’s revenues.
This demonstrates that the mobile consumer has been trained to pay for content.
Source: http://www.flurry.com/