Millennials Favor Smartphones, TV-Connected Devices

Millennials' weekly smartphone consumption is nearing their traditional TV usage -- at levels much higher than the average adult.

In a recent report on fourth-quarter millennials' usage, Nielsen says young media consumers 18-34 spend 17 hours and 49 minutes a week (17:49) using their smartphones, near traditional weekly TV levels -- 19:18 hours/minutes a week.

This compares with smartphone usage for all adults at 13:02 hours/minutes per week and 34:32 hours/minutes of traditional TV usage.

But while millennials' traditional TV usage is the lowest among all age groups, they also rank highest when it comes to TV-connected devices: 7:16 hours/minutes. TV-connected devices use (DVR, game console, DVD, multimedia device) is at 4:38 hours/minutes for 35-and 2:11 for those 50+.

Nielsen says millennials spent 1,179 minutes in the fourth quarter of 2016 on smartphones, while consumers 35-49 spent less than half that time -- 659 minutes per adult.

One of the biggest digital uses for millennials is music. Nielsen says digital music has not come at the expense of traditional broadcast music.

The average monthly reach of broadcast radio was 72 million in 2012, dipping a bit in the following years. It then rose to 72 million in 2016. At the same time, digital music's average monthly reach in 2016 was 48 million -- a steady increase from 2012, when it was 25 million.

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