Mobile apps are dominating media consumption, but getting users to use your app is really, really hard:
U.S. users are now spending the majority of their time consuming digital media within mobile applications, according to a new study released by comScore this morning. That means mobile apps, including the number 1 most popular app Facebook, eat up more of our time than desktop usage or mobile web surfing, accounting for 52% of the time spent using digital media. Combined with mobile web, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%.
Apps today are driving the majority of media consumption activity, the report claims, now accounting for 7 our of every 8 minutes of media consumption on mobile devices. On smartphones, app activity is even higher, at 88% usage versus 82% on tablets.
So apps are where media gets consumed. But that doesn’t mean media companies should throw all their efforts at mobile apps. Because getting users to download and use those apps is incredibly difficult:
Only about one-third of smartphone owners download any apps in an average month, with the bulk of those downloading one to three apps. …a “staggering 42% of all app time spent on smartphones occurs on the individual’s single most used app,” comScore reports.
For most media companies, taking advantage of mobile apps means optimizing content for the mobile apps of Facebook and Twitter, and for email. That might not sound ideal — no one wants to be dependent on a monolithic third party like Facebook to deliver their product — but that’s how it is, for now at least.
beyond the times 