From June 2013 to June 2015, the average amount of time consumers spent online with digital media grew 49%. Mobile app use was far and away the leader with time spent in apps growing 90% and contributing to 77% of the increase in time spent with digital media. Time spent in mobile browsers, meanwhile grew 53%, and laptop and desktop time grew 16%.
Here’s the breakdown of the time consumers spent with digital media in June 2015:
- Consumers spent 550,522 minutes with digital media on desktop and laptop PCs
- 118,299 minutes in mobile web browsers
- 778,954 minutes in mobile apps
Mobile is clearly outpacing computer in time spent online. 62% of U.S. consumers’ time spent with digital media is with smartphone and tablets. And 54% of the time consumers spend with digital media occurs within a mobile app.
Time spent in smartphone apps specifically, (not smartphone and tablet apps) is now approaching nearly half of all time spent with digital media, comScore reports. 44% of total digital media time spent is in smartphone apps, according to the report, “The 2015 U.S. Mobile App Report,” which tracks the sites and apps of 1,000 of the largest digital companies, including retailers, travel companies, financial services businesses and entertainment companies.
The report also notes:
- Consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 spend the most time with smartphone apps—on average 90.6 hours per month. The amount of time spent in smartphone apps falls with age.
- Mobile time spent first surpassed desktop and laptop online time in 2014
- The top 6—and 8 of the top 9—apps as ranked by unique monthly visitors are owned by Facebook or Google. Much of app time spent is spent in entertainment and social media apps like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram
- The average smartphone user visits 25 mobile apps per month; however, nearly 4 out of 5 smartphone app minutes are spent on the individual’s top three apps
- Apps attract on average 3.3 million monthly unique visitors and visitors spend on average 201.8 minutes each month in the app
- Compared to the typical app, the typical mobile website gets many more unique visitors: 8.9 million monthly unique visitors; however, mobile site visitors spend a much lower 10.9 minutes on average a month on a mobile site.
“It may be more challenging to build a large audience on apps, but those app users are a very loyal bunch,” comScore writes in its report. “They spend more than three hours per month on the top 1,000 apps on average–about 18 times greater than what mobile web visitors spend on the top 1,000 properties.”
Beyond utility apps, such as e-mail and weather, and social apps such as Facebook, consumers often use apps pertaining to their daily habits, such as buying coffee. The Starbucks app, which allows shoppers to pay through it and, more recently, order ahead, has grown its unique visitors 100% since 2013. Meanwhile, unique visitors to Dunkin’ Donuts’ smartphone app grew 456% in the same time period.
Walmart, Target and Kohl’s, which use their apps to drive consumers to stores by featuring in-store coupons and promotions, have grown their app unique monthly visitors significantly from June 2014 to June 2015 by 402%, 85% and 259% respectively.
Fitbit leads among fitness apps with 9 million monthly active users, 43% of which access the app each day. Sports apparel retailer Under Armour, which acquired MapMyFitness and MyFitnessPal, is focusing on this category comScore says. Meanwhile, ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft have grown exponentially over the past year, increasing their unique monthly visitors by 453% and 187%, respectively.
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