How Digital Time Spent breaks down by Device, Gender, Content Area

  While the desktop PC may still have the greatest reach among US web users, time spent accessing the internet via mobile has surpassed time spent on the PC, according to research from mobile ad network Jumptap and comScore. This is in keeping with eMarketer’s findings, which estimate that this year, for the first time, time spent on nonvoice mobile activities will surpass time spent online on desktops and laptops.

comScore and Jumptap found that in April 2013, time spent accessing the web on smartphones and tablets surpassed time spent online on the PC by 2 percentage points. The amount of time women 25 to 49 years old spent on the smartphone and tablet was particularly notable, reaching above 60%, while for men in that age range, the PC remained the platform where they spent more than half their online time.

Plenty of online content areas were still firmly rooted in PC use, with the desktop accounting for more than 60% of time spent accessing auto, business, TV, news and sports content. Game playing and radio were predominantly mobile activities, while two-thirds of social activity went to the smartphone and tablet. And visual-focused content, including food, entertainment, lifestyle and retail, were beginning to tip toward mobile.

Looking at the gender breakdown of online usage in March 2013, Jumptap and comScore found that sports was one of the most common types of content accessed across platforms among 25- to 49-year-old men. Time spent with internet sports content reached over 2 hours on average that month on each of the major devices studied—the PC, smartphone and tablet. Men also accessed online business content for equal periods of time on the PC and smartphone (1.2 hours each), while the tablet accounted for 17.2% of men’s time spent with this online category.

The study also measured the amount of time women spent on select content activities, and found that the tablet was in especially heavy rotation for lifestyles, retail and parenting content. Female respondents spent more than 5 hours on average accessing each of these content areas on the tablet, with the smartphone in second place for each subject matter, and the PC further behind.

The data suggests that the tablet is playing a big role in women’s uptake of the mobile web, and that this demographic is responding to the interactivity of the devices in significant numbers.

Courtesy of eMarketer