• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 29, 2015

Social media apps are the first thing people check on their smartphones when they wake up in the morning and one of the most popular app categories before they go to bed at night, according to the latest State of Mobile Advertising Report from Opera Mediaworks. The findings are based on the mobile behaviors of around 1.1 billion unique users across more than 19,000 sites and apps.

Focusing on smartphone users in the U.S., social media apps led the way as the “first app of the day” and also in terms of audience size, followed by games, entertainment, and news and information apps, Opera Mediaworks found. At night entertainment was the most popular category for “last app of the day,” followed by social media, which however boasted a near-equivalent audience size. Games came in third place followed by news and information.

Opera Mediaworks also found that “first app” and “last app” favorites often changed over the course of the month, with some categories showing greater loyalty than others. For example, despite its smaller audience size there was much high loyalty among people who access news and information apps first or last during the day, meaning they didn’t often switch to other types of apps.

By contrast, loyalty for games and entertainment apps tended to be lower, reflecting more volatility in category preferences. Social media ranked around the middle in terms of category loyalty for both morning and evening usage.

Turning to monetization, games led the way for eCPMs, although their impression volumes were lower, partly because of the high volume of video ads in that category. Entertainment had the largest overall audience and a slightly higher eCPM than social media, although they generated fewer impressions per user than the social audience; Opera noted that social media still relies on simple banner ads, which command relatively low prices.