Mobile Is Starting To Reach TV-Sized Audiences

At this point, users are spending more time in fewer apps.

The comScore 2015 report shows that users spend four out of five minutes on some combination of just three apps. Opera Mediaworks has observed that the top 100 apps have users that spend about 30 minutes a day in their apps, with an average session length of eight minutes (about three sessions a day).

The data comes from the company’s Mobile First Insights report from Q1 this year.

In terms of reach, mobile’s audience sizes are starting to rival TV’s, with apps like Shazam getting 18.3 million users—5.6 million more users/viewers than a show like "The Walking Dead" commands.

While much of the conversation in the space revolves around different categories, like mobile search, m-commerce, messaging and social media, Opera says that apps that drive educational and entertainment opportunities are the ones that drive the most impressions.

Categories like games, news and information, and social networking had the highest levels of engagement. The high levels of engagement and long session times make them highly desirable categories for mobile advertisers to buy into.

Comparing apps to mobile Web, impressions served on mobile apps drove higher revenues, while mobile Web impressions got a higher click-through rate (potentially due to “fat thumbs” syndrome).

In terms of data, the report says that integrating partner SDKs provides the cleanest route to collect data. Indirect partnerships through ad exchanges can be suspect, but a direct link to the source allows advertisers to be certain of who is seeing their ad and when.

7 comments about "Mobile Is Starting To Reach TV-Sized Audiences".
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  1. John Grono from GAP Research, May 18, 2016 at 8:59 p.m.

    Where is the data that justifies the claim "TV-Sized Audiences"?

  2. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, May 19, 2016 at 6:33 a.m.

    Ben's probably referring to smartphone videos reaching almost as many viewers as TV's "long tail" channels, John. As you know, those are the channels whose audiences ---per minute---are so tiny that Nielsen wont report them.

  3. Leonard Zachary from T___n__, May 19, 2016 at 2:47 p.m.

    Ed whether a viewer watches a 3 minute video with 30 second pre-roll aggregating an audience of 5 million over 24 hours or a viewer watches  1 hour of programming with 18 minutes of ads, one such ad same as the pre-roll 30 second spot, aggregating 2 million over a 3 day period then what is the point you are trying to make? The real-time analytics do not need Nielsen....maybe its called more efficient advertising.

  4. Ken Mallon from Ken Mallon Advisory Services replied, May 19, 2016 at 5:42 p.m.

    They gave an example ("In terms of reach, mobile’s audience sizes are starting to rival TV’s, with apps like Shazam getting 18.3 million users—5.6 million more users/viewers than a show like "The Walking Dead" commands") to show that an app can be bigger than a show you might suspect has decent audience.

  5. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, May 19, 2016 at 6:42 p.m.

    Ken, from an advertiser's point of view all that matters is how many consumers had a chance to watch the commercial on a per expoure opportunity basis. If an advertiser buys a spot in a single telecast of a particular show, this is reported by Nielsen's average minute "viewer" projections. To compare this with digital the measurement must be only for those situations where the advertiser pays for a potential commercial esposure and gets it, not all of the content that a viewer might access, regardless of whether it contains said ad.  You can't compare a TV show's average minute audience to an app's total reach.

  6. Leonard Zachary from T___n__ replied, May 23, 2016 at 1:35 p.m.

    If course you can, it's called Attribution.

  7. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC replied, May 23, 2016 at 5 p.m.

    Attribution is a very weak science - and I say this as both a mathematician by training and having spent extensive time in direct response.

    Truth is, after listening to a great many discuss attribution as well as doing our own unique work in it, last touch is about all you can do when you have a rich, modern media environment. You can do more for that rare customer who starts online and stays online on a single device for everything they do. But that's the exception.

    So I fully concur with Ed:  You can't compare a TV show's average minute audience to an app's total reach. A few years back I wrote this blog post after Google was doing the same with Lady Gaga in their "why we're so cool"presentations to marketers. "Big Numbers are not the same as Meaningful Numbers" http://atomicdirect.com/blog/brand-advertising/an-axiom-for-new-media-big-numbers-are-not-the-same-as-meaningful-numbers/

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