Mobile Applications Account For Half The Time Spent Online

A rapidly growing phenomenon.

A comScore study reveals that Americans now spend 50% of their time online (on fixed and mobile devices) using mobile applications on their smartphones, compared with 41% two years ago and 34% three years ago. If we add tablets into the mix, this proportion rises to nearly 60%.

This summer, the most popular mobile applications (by number of users) were, in decreasing order, Facebook, Messenger, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Play, Gmail, Pandora, Instagram, Amazon, Apple Music, Apple Maps, Pokémon GO, Snapchat and Pinterest.

Mobile applications drive increased concentration of online uses. Indeed, one third of the time spent on mobile applications in America is dedicated to Facebook.

For marketers, this evolution is synonymous with both the concentration and the fragmentation of their advertising channels: Concentration¹ because Internet users focus their attention on a limited number of platforms and fragmentation because these platforms are inevitably less open than the Internet.

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¹ This concentration is all the more dangerous for media entities since they haven’t yet implemented the mergers and acquisitions rendered imperative by the economic constraints influencing their development.