Online media consumption overtakes traditional in most countries: Study

According to GlobalWebIndex's ongoing study of internet consumer’s attitudes, the trend is particularly pronounced in countries like the UAE and China, where total online time across platforms takes up 7.3 and 6.1 hours, respectively. Globally, consumers spend 5.6 hours on digital.

Chinese consumers spend the least time with traditional media, which accounts for just 35 per cent of their media time. Game consoles, online PC and online mobile account for 9.43 media hours each day.

Consumers in Malaysia and Thailand are turning out to be more balanced, spending equal time on traditional and digital. In Malaysia, consumers spend about eight hours of their 12.69 hours online. In Thailand that number is about 6.99 hours out of 12.67. Interestingly, consumers in Japan and South Korea were scarce across all media, spending just 7.56 hours on media.

Social media increasingly dominates the time that consumers spend online. Globally it accounts for 48 per cent of total digital time, and the trend is even more dramatic in emerging internet markets. In the Philippines for instance, consumers spend 5.4 hours online in social, out of their total 7.17 hours online.

Online radio is building a strong consumer usage pattern in Asia-Pacific countries and is now bigger than broadcast radio in Thailand and China, where it takes 0.9 hours per day.

Globally, traditional media such as TV, radio and newspapers still account for the majority of media time in mature internet markets such as The Netherlands, Germany, the UK and US.

TV remains the strongest traditional medium, taking up an average of 2.49 hours a day across all markets. Alternative digital forms of TV still have a way to go to catch up with China, which leads growth at 1.14 hours a day.

The report also reveals that news is now the content format that consumers are most likely to source online, particularly in emerging markets such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil.

Overall, physical print and online news are at parity, but physical print still attracts more time than online news in Turkey, Malaysia and China. Globally, consumers are spending an average of 0.63 hours with both traditional print and online news.

“This data shows why it is so critical to build a holistic communications strategy,” said Tom Smith, founder of GlobalWebIndex. “Consumers worldwide have increasingly digitalised their media consumption and online now dominates the way they spend their day. This is a clear argument for online media to get a greater share of advertising spend, regardless of where you are in the world.”

Digital 2013 – A Global Analysis of How Consumers Spend Their Media Time was conducted by GlobalWebIndex in the last quarter of 2012. The results are based on more than 32,000 internet users from 31 countries. The study was initiated in July 2009 and has since come out with seven research products, covering more than 152,000 internet users in 31 countries.