Comment: When one thinks about the abysmal state of ignorance of the average American and the complete lack of interest in anything happening outside of their own lives, it's not surprising to see the state that the world is in. We have been given handheld distraction machines to keep us from paying attention to reality, to keep us in a virtual world, and the vast majority of the world is more than happy to remain distracted. Considering how much global mobile use is increasing, it certainly looks as though people are turning more and more to blocking out reality via their cellphones than ever before.
Smartphone and tablet users just can't get enough of their mobile devices. Some do nearly everything with phone in hand.
U.S. consumers spend, on average, three hours and 40 minutes each day on their mobile devices, an increase of 35% from a year ago in the second quarter of 2014. And that time spent on mobile devices continues to increase, said Simon Khalaf, senior vice president of publishing products at Yahoo.
Globally there are 280 million "mobile addicts," who use apps more than 60 times daily. Effectively, "these folks are conducting their lives on mobile," Khalaf said. Regular users access apps up to 16 times daily, Flurry's research found.
Over the last six months, the average time consumers spend on their phones or devices has increased by 43 minutes, or 24%, he said. "This is the mobile revolution," Khalaf said. "There hasn't been a single industry that hasn't been disrupted by mobile and its applications."
Khalaf revealed the findings Wednesday at Yahoo's mobile developer conference in New York. The new data, also posted on the Yahoo Developer Tumblr page, came from mobile analytics company Flurry, which he was CEO of when Yahoo acquired Flurry in July 2014, and other sources including comScore and NetMarketShare. Flurry tracks 720,000 apps across two billion mobile devices.
Time spent in apps dominated user activity, accounting for 90% of mobile device time, compared to 10% spent on mobile web browsers. Social, messaging and entertainment apps such as YouTube accounted for more than half of time (51%) spent on mobile.
Time spent consuming media more than doubled from a year ago, up 108%, to 96 minutes daily. And global consumer spending on in-app purchases rose from $21 billion in 2014 to $33 billion this year. "In mobile industry, content is king again," Khalaf said. "What is even more phenomenal is that people are paying for content."
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Reader Comments
What are these people escaping from when they spend so much time in the virtual world?
This is like a science-fiction story where the evil overlords entrap the population in a virtual reality so far removed from what the overlords are doing in the real world that nobody ever notices the evil deeds being carried out.
Of course that's just a story and it could never happen in real life....
The programming seems nearly complete, no? Just download the app selected for you by your profile and get your programming updates on a regular basis so that you don't miss your drug of choice... and it is all about choice, free will... sort of.. hard to say it's free when you don't know it's there.... more like a possibility with extremely low probability. Sheep with tracking devices that serve as control devices in the sense that control has been discarded with realizing it... is it really a loss if you never knew you had it?
I took a friend of mine along with his kids.........fishing on my boat. When we got back I was securing the boat and noticed the guys daughter shaking uncontrollably and crying as he was trying to comfort her. I thought she was having a diabetic seizure...........nope.........she had dropped her cell phone in the water...........she remained in daze the rest of the afternoon.