• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 14, 2016

Ready for more impressive figures from comScore’s 2016 U.S. Mobile App report?

Well, thanks to huge gains in mobile, audiences are up by 36% among top digital media properties, over the past two years.

Specifically, mobile audiences have grown 81% in that time period, while desktop has actually experienced a 4% decline.

In case you’re interested, mobile audiences first surpassed desktop in June 2014. Over the past two years, they have now doubled those on desktop.

Yesterday, I mentioned how the app boom has been widely credited with driving mobile, in recent years.

Increasingly, however, mobile audience growth is being driven by mobile Web properties, which are now actually bigger and growing faster than apps.

After comparing the top 1,000 apps with the top 1,000 mobile Web properties, comScore found that the mobile Web is now responsible for big audiences on mobile. Indeed, mobile Web audiences are almost 3 times the size -- and growing 2 times as fast -- as app audiences.

That’s despite apps’ continued dominance in usage time, mind you. By contrast, mobile Web audiences tend to be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” in the words of comScore’s researchers. In other words, “As audiences increase, average time on mobile Web declines.”

To be clear, mobile Web audiences continue to climb, but the new audiences being reached are “lightly engaged and bring down the average time spent figures,” comScore finds.

Of note, much of this new traffic is drive-by social referral, according to comScore.

“While this traffic can help establish larger audience reach for mobile media properties, there may also be limits to the advertising opportunity it creates if users don’t return,” comScore’s researchers warn.

Meanwhile, app audiences are growing, with apps reaching more than 5 million users -- up dramatically from 2014.

The growing number of mobile apps reaching large audiences proves that apps should not only be viewed in terms of engagement metrics alone, comScore declares.

In particular, big gains were observed in the number of apps with 10-to-20 million users.

Yet, apps’ walled garden environment makes reaching audience scale much harder than the more linkable desktop and mobile Web.