Late last year an important milestone in the evolution of digital was achieved, and it went unnoticed by most brand marketers: mobile devices surpassed the PC internet in terms of where we spend our time. According to eMarketer, mobile now accounts for 23% of the time spent with digital media. That’s up from just 4% four years ago. And it’s now slightly ahead of the time we spend on our PCs.
In fact, mobile phones are the only digital devices we’re spending more time with year over year. While TV, PC internet, radio and print have all seen year-over-year declines lately, the time we spend on our smartphones is growing at double-digit rates – a 43% increase over 2013!

In 2013, time spent with digital media among US adults surpassed time spent with TV for the first time—with mobile driving the shift.
And what do we do on our smartphones? We play games and use social media. A study by Flurry Analytics and Comscore shows that those two activities consume 60% of our time on mobile.

Android and iOS users in the US spend an average of 2:42 every day using apps on smartphones and tablets .
Facebook accounts for the largest chunk of our time on our mobile devices. We spend more time on the Facebook app than we do browsing the web. Which means Facebook is becoming THE place where consumers discover and interact with brand content, as they spend less and less time browsing the PC web.
It also means that consumers now snack on content. Instead of leisurely exploring content on websites, they are now more likely to consume single (small) portions found in their newsfeed. (Indeed, a cross-sample of client websites revealed that Facebook Mobile delivers up to 40% FEWER page views per visit.)
This relentless march to mobile is not going to halt. In fact, it’s picking up the pace. For brands relying on content marketing, this has dramatic implications. More on that in my next post on the mobile revolution.
Peter Coish is the founder of KURATION. He can be reached by email here.