Apps Over Web: Mobile Users Spend Only 14 Percent of Their Time on Websites
It's confirmed: The way to get your company in front of mobile users' eyes is through an app, not a mobile version of your website. Apps dominate the mobile web, with 86 percent of mobile users' time spent on apps instead of websites -- and that's no April Fools joke.
That tidbit, plus a lot of information about the mobile web, was released by mobile analytic and advertising company Flurry in a report on Tuesday.
Mobile Apps Over Web
Running an analysis from a network of over 450,000 mobile apps installed on over 1.3 billion mobile devices around the world, along with data from website analytics company comScore, Flurry has determined that mobile users now spend an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes per day on their mobile devices. Two hours and 19 minutes of that time was spent on mobile apps. That means only about 14 percent of users mobile time is spent browsing the mobile web, with the rest devoted mainly to Facebook, Flappy bird and other mobile apps.
The dominance of mobile apps isn't exactly news, but their continuing encroachment on the mobile web is. Last year, Flurry analytics showed that apps took about 80 percent of mobile users' time, with the rest on the mobile web. It appears that the total amount of time you can spend on a mobile device has topped out, as this year the average time users spent on mobile devices only increased about 4 minutes per day compared to last year.
Breaking It Down
This year, gaming apps stayed constant at 32 percent of users' time spent, while social media apps gained from 24 percent to 28 percent.
A few particular apps are still dominant in users' time spent (you can probably guess a couple of them). Facebook, with the help of Instagram, itself takes an average of 17 percent of peoples' time on their mobile devices. Though Facebook dipped slightly this year, it's maintaining its predominance over other social apps like Twitter, which only garnered an average of 1.5 percent of mobile users' time.
Social messaging was the biggest change in app usage, with the general category taking up nearly 10 percent of the average U.S. consumer's mobile time and helping to grow the social media category this year. No wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought $19 billion was a decent asking price for the most popular, and growing, social messaging service, WhatsApp. Flurry predicts Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp will help solidify its already strong standing in the mobile world.
Ad Time
Since Flurry is an advertising analytics company, it also broke down how well app companies are spending their ad money.
Usually this wouldn't be too interesting, but according to Flurry's analysis, Facebook is pretty much right on the money with the amount of ad revenue versus users' time spent. But while all other apps aren't getting the kind of revenue-to-time they deserve, in general, Google is getting way more ad revenues than its users' time spent on Google applications merits.
Must be the Mountain View company's recognizable name -- you know, the same term you use for searching the web, which apparently no one does anymore on mobile.