Global Mobile Use to Surge 28% in 2016

People around the world will increase their mobile Internet usage by nearly 28 percent this year, according to a June report by London-based media services network ZenithOptimedia.

Nearly an hour-and-a-half will now be devoted by people globally per day — an average of 86 minutes — to mobile Internet, according to Zenith’s report, which is titled “Media Consumption Forecasts,” a surge that will account for an overall global media consumption increase of 1.4 percent.

Nearly three-quarters — 71 percent — of all Internet media consumption is now mobile, according to the report. Accounting for much of these gains is Asia Pacific and North America, where mobile use now constitutes, respectively, 73 percent and 72 percent of all Internet media consumption.

Zenith’s forecast also suggests that mobile’s gains are coming at a cost to other media formats. Desktop Internet use, which continued to grow globally until 2014, is now experiencing a worldwide decline, and is expected to fall 15.8 percent in 2016 to comprise an average daily use time of only 36 minutes.

Use of all other forms of media are similarly expected to dip, according to the report. Movie theater use is expected for shrink by .5 percent this year. Television, still the most widely used media format — accounting for 41 percent of all global media consumption in 2015 — will decline 1.5 percent in 2016. Radio will fall 2.4 percent, and print media is expected to plummet, with newspapers tumbling by 5.6 percent and magazines experiencing a debilitating drop of 6.7 percent. Taken together, all non-mobile forms of media use are expected to decline by 3.4 percent this year.

Zenith’s forecast comes on the heels of a recent report by digital market research company eMarketer that yielded similar findings. eMarketer’s June “US Time Spent with Media” report also suggested that mobile has been responsible for driving total daily media consumption, and found that U.S. adults now spend an average of about three hours and six minutes each day consuming media via mobile devices, revealing that daily use time with this medium has more than doubled since 2012.

Like the Zenith report, eMarketer’s analysis suggests that gains in digital media — particularly, mobile — have come at the expense of its analogue counterparts, resulting in losses to broadcast and print consumption. However, the eMarketer report also suggests that daily consumption of digital media would see slower gains in the coming years, as Americans may be nearing a total media saturation point.

ZenithOptimedia’s annual forecast, which surveys global patterns of media consumption, included data from 71 countries. Details on the report’s key findings can be found here.