Q4 | 2016
Over 50 million users accessed the internet via their desktop, smartphone and tablet devices in December 2016.
- Share of minutes to mobile devices (smartphones + tablets) continued to increase. They now account for two-thirds of adults' time online, with smartphones alone generating 50% of all minutes.
- There is a strong relationship between age and platform usage – 65% of online time among 18-24s is via a smartphone and this decreases with increasing age to only 31% for 55+s.
- Despite mobile taking the lion’s share of minutes, the desktop still has higher adult online reach (90%) compared to smartphones (70%) and tablets (47%).
- 74% of adults are multi-platform but this is lower among social class A, who are more likely to only use the desktop and social class E who are more likely to only use a mobile. 1 in 10 adults are now mobile only but this is higher among females (12%) than males (7%).
- Google’s total audience increased by 5% to 95.9% of the UK online population between September and December. Google shopping (+1.5m) and Youtube (+2.3m) contributed to this uplift.
- Snapchat enters the top 10 for total ‘time spent’ among adults – visitors spend on average nearly 6.5 hours per month on the social networking site.
- Predictably, retail sites dominated the top 10 growth sites in December with Home Retail Group (Argos) being the main beneficiary - up by 4.5 million unique visitors compared to September. Dixons, Tesco, Debenhams and John Lewis also added over 3 million users.
