‘Always-on’ consumer just a myth

Consumers may look like they are constantly checking their phones, tablets and PCs but according to new figures the average Briton spends just 2 hours 51 minutes a day “actively” using the Internet at home and work.
That is the surprising finding of a study which claims to provide the “definitive” guide to how long consumers spend online each day in an effort to show advertisers the challenge they face.
Released by The Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) and UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM), the research is designed to bring clarity to the market by removing any confusion around the conflicting sources claiming to measure time online.
According to the study, Internet time is split 1 hour 16 minutes (45%) on PCs/laptops, 1 hour 9 minutes on smartphones (40%) and 26 minutes on tablets (15%).
However, the figures purely measure “active attention”, that is, only the time people are actively using the Internet to do something.
IAB chief strategy officer Tim Elkington explained: “If I’m surfing the Internet on my PC but then start using a word document, the Internet time is stopped even though the web page is still open. A similar approach is applied on mobile when Internet activity is interrupted due to calls or texting.
“There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to the various sources claiming to measure how long people spend on different media. So, we wanted to put a stake in the ground for Internet time to remove this misconception and help advertisers understand how much time they realistically have to play with to reach people online. It equates to about 1 in every 6 waking minutes¹.”
The data comes from a combination of meters measuring the behaviour of 73,000 people (a panel) plus thousands of sites and apps being tagged (site analytics).
The UKOM/comScore data reveals that 16.7% of all UK Internet time (1 in every 6 minutes) across computers, tablets and smartphones is spent on social media – up from 12% two years ago. Social media has overtaken entertainment, whose share nearly halved from 22.1% to 12.4%.
Games follows next at 6% share – double that of two years ago (3%). Together, these activities account for over one third of Britons’ time online.
Social media accounts for over double the share of mobile/tablet Internet time (21.4%) than it does of desktop Internet time (9.8%). Games (8.6% vs 2.3%), Instant Messaging (6.7% vs 0.8%) and News (4.8% vs 2.2%) also take up a much larger proportion of mobile Internet time than desktop time.
In contrast, entertainment accounts for over double the share of desktop Internet time (18.5%) than it does on mobile/tablet (8.3%); for email, it’s over six times the share (5.0% vs 0.8%).
​“When trying to reach consumers, advertisers can’t afford to think of time online as a homogenous entity,” said UKOM’s general manager Scott Fleming. “Mobile Internet time is more heavily skewed towards social networking and games whilst desktop is more loaded towards email and entertainment such as film and multimedia. “The most effective digital ad strategies recognise and take into account how behaviour and mind-set differ dramatically by device.”