Last week, Flurry – the mobile analytics company acquired by Yahoo in July – wrote in a blog post that “time spent on mobile devices grew in the US by 9.3% – from 2 hrs and 42 minutes to 2 hrs and 57 minutes – in the past nine months.”
The significance of this is that people are now spending more time on their mobile devices than watching TV: mobile is now the first place first screen. The time spent watching TV by the average US consumer has held steady at 2 hrs and 48 minutes.
The author of the post, Simon Khalaf, the President and CEO of Flurry, admits that while there is no way to measure the overlap between time spent watching TV and using mobile devices:
we believe that there is plenty of overlap between the time spent on TV and that on mobile devices. It is a tall order to believe that the smart device (and app) industry, which didn’t exist six and half years ago, can take out an industry entrenched in every American household since the middle of the last century. But it has happened. Smart devices are practical, and are glued to consumers 24/7/365. Those factors, combined with the content explosion on these devices through millions of apps, helped mobile snatch the big prize from television. As of September 2014, it is a new world in the American living room.
There is little disagreement that second screen devices are being used while watching TV, but according to Deloitte’s latest ‘Digital Democracy Survey,’ only 22 percent of consumers are engaging in activities related to the show they’re watching. Some reports have this percentage even lower. Twitter and Facebook are working with advertisers to change that; Tumblr (another Yahoo-owned company), on the other hand, seems content with filling the content gaps between episodes.