Study: TV Still King Of Global Media While Radio, Print In Decline

New figures out Monday show TV remains the top draw for eye balls, desktop Internet use is waning and mobile’s slice of people’s screen time is growing.

Zenith, a media-buying agency that’s part of Publicis Media, said that almost three-quarters of Internet usage in North America (72 percent) will be done on mobile this year. That’s a huge increase over 2015.

A release previewing its second annual Media Consumption Forecasts notes the “amount of time people around the world devote to using mobile internet will increase by 27.7 percent” in 2016. That’s part of an overall increase of 1.4 percent in survey respondents’ media consumption.

“Mobile technology is transforming the way people around the world consume media, and is expanding overall media consumption,” Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s head of forecasting, said in a statement. “It provides traditional media owners the opportunity to reach people and places they’ve never had access to previously, and gives consumers entirely new ways to find and enjoy compelling content.”

According to the global study that covers 71 countries, people on average this year will spend 86 minutes a day accessing the Web via their phones, compared to 36 minutes through desktop. At its peak, desktop Internet consumption reached 52 minutes a day in 2014, according to the report.

Desktop Web surfing isn’t the only form of media consumption that’s now suffering. Traditional media will also experience shrinking reach in 2016 with cinema expected to see a 0.5-percent decline, outdoor media a 0.8-percent drop, television will shrink by 1.5 percent, radio will see a 2.4 drop while newspapers and magazines will see a drop in consumption by 5.6 and 6.7 percent respectively. Still, that decrease is just in the amount of time people spend consuming those media in their traditional formats.

Meanwhile, despite the dip TV still dominates global media habits. It attracted 177 minutes of consumption a day in 2015, according to the report, while Internet consumption came second at 110 minutes a day. Globally, TV viewing accounted for 41 percent of media consumption in 2015. Zenith forecasts that it will account for 38 percent in 2018, while the Internet will count for 31 percent of consumption two years from now.

In the next two years, mobile consumption will start to level off. But people overall are expected to consume 7.4 hours of media a day on average by 2018, up from 6.7 hours in 2010.