Time Spent In Mobile Apps Is Starting To Challenge Television, Flurry Says
Now that usage of mobile apps has overtaken browsing on the desktop web, it's starting to challenge television, Flurry says. The San Francisco-based mobile analytics startup says that consumers are spending 127 minutes per …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of Flurry's measurement campaign. In [[a:1192527|August 2011 the analytics firm argued that mobile app inventory was hungry enough to eat internet display ad spend]]; this December 2012 report extends the argument from ad dollars to raw attention, claiming consumers spend 127 minutes per day in apps and that app usage has already overtaken desktop web browsing.
The pickup was unusually broad for an analytics blog post — CNET, VentureBeat, GigaOM, Business Insider and others all ran it on or about December 5, 2012 — because Flurry is positioning itself as the arbiter of a question advertisers care about: whether the TV budget is finally comparable to the app budget.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies gain a headline number — 127 daily minutes in apps versus television — that gives them a direct basis for shifting brand budgets toward mobile, and Flurry cements its role as the measurement layer for that shift.
- Television's long-standing claim to being the default mass-attention medium now has a quantified challenger, forcing broadcasters and their measurement partners to defend TV time with comparable daily-minutes data.
Second-order effects
- If buyers start treating app minutes as a substitute for TV reach, pricing pressure moves toward whoever can measure and sell engaged app audiences at scale — an advantage for analytics firms like Flurry and the ad networks plugged into their SDKs.
- Free-to-play developers, who by mid-2011 were already out-earning premium titles in the App Store per Flurry's own data, become the natural sellers of that attention, deepening the shift of monetization from upfront purchase to sustained engagement.
Third-order effects
- The structural stake is control of cross-media measurement: if app-time benchmarks keep closing on TV, audience measurement migrates from panel-based TV ratings toward SDK-derived behavioral data, changing who sets the rates for the entire attention market.
- Whether Flurry's figures hold up under independent scrutiny will shape how fast that migration happens — its numbers come from its own network, so competing measurement standards have room to contest the claim.
The trend: Mobile app engagement is emerging as a measurable rival to television for consumer attention, with analytics vendors racing to own the yardstick advertisers use to price both.