Smartphones twice as popular as PCs for internet use
Smartphones account for 57% of people who go on the internet, compared with 27% for PCs and 16% on tablets.
Verto Analytics tracked almost 5,000 UK adults in its research. Dr. Hannu Verkasalo, its CEO, said: “Mobile’s dominance at every hour of the day is a change from recent years when desktop PCs tended to be the most popular device for going online during the middle hours of the day and in the middle part of the evening.
“Businesses of any kind looking to appeal to consumers need to think of mobiles as mini computers instead of mere phones because people increasingly conduct more of their lives through them. Daily behaviour is either rapidly shifting away from PCs or going straight to mobile, highlighted by services designed almost entirely for mobiles such as Uber and Snapchat.”
Smartphones are at their most dominant between 8am and 11am when they account for 63% of people online – three times as many as are on a PC. PCs tend to have the largest share of the online audience between 1am and 3am ( 38%) but their highest share during normal waking hours is 29% between 6pm and 11pm.
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1 Comment
Bennick
8 years ago
Interesting article. Would be good to know a bit more about the sample that was used and the breakdown of devices. Was there an equal number of mobiles, tablets and PCs included in the research? If the proportion of devices being tracked is dominated by mobiles and you’re measuring the raw number of people using a device to access the internet then you probably would expect to mobile access to come out on top. Similarly, were work devices included in this? I would guess that quite a few people at work would be using their work PCs to access the internet and I doubt a lot of companies would allow work PCs or devices to be signed up to a metering trial…
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