People Spend 40% of Waking Hours Communicating or Consuming Media

Benedict Evans - Mobile Is Eating the World

If it seems that everyone you know is staring at a mobile screen during the day, that is because they are. 

During most parts of the day, 40 percent of all U.S. consumers are interacting with media and content or communicating, according to . 

In the evening hours, that percentage can rise to 70 percent, according to venture capitalist Benedict Evans.

U.S. consumers spend about three hours a day interacting with their mobile devices, about two hours and 48 minutes watching TV, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

In other words, the number one screen, for content consumption,  is the mobile phone.

The television, which once was known as the “first screen,” and the personal computer, once known as the “second screen,” now have yielded their positions. Mobile has become--in terms of engagement time--the first screen. 

TVs possibly are the second screen, while PCs and tablets are the third screens.

In fact, U.S. consumers now spend more time on smartphones than PCs.

There also is a virtual certainty that people are looking at their mobile screens even when in front of the TV, so engagement with TV content arguably is dropping. According to Flurry, time spent on mobile devices grew by 9.3 percent in the past nine months.