It’s sometimes said that you can prove anything with statistics – in fact, 38% of people made that claim in 2014 alone. However, correctly interpreted, stats can show us trends and counter-trends that can predict future activity, as well as interpret how we got here. According to statista.com, for example, while desktop computer use is still rising, it’s been overtaken both by tablet use, and even more so by smartphones, since the end of 2010. By December 2013, smartphones had overtaken desktop computers in terms of the number of minutes people spent online, a trend that continued into 2014. So what are people doing online with their mobile devices?
Smartphones & Tablets
There’s a split, according to 2014 figures, between daily activity on tablets and smartphones. Some differences make a lot of sense – for example, almost everyone still uses smartphones every day for text messaging, but few use tablets. Email is still the most popular activity – bearing in mind that these figures are what the device owners claim to be doing – while around three quarters of users are doing internet searches every day.
Games
These more “traditional” online activities are followed in popularity by others that rely partly on increased screen quality, as well as faster connections. Well over half of users now play games on tablets and phones every day. There are now huge numbers of popular sites like mrsmithcasino.co.uk offering online games like poker and blackjack, but the number of free games, and the wider range of people they’re designed for (i.e. not just the old stereotype of hardcore gamers) is also increasing online gaming activity.
Popular Sites
Social media activity is something the huge majority of device owners do every day, but increased screen size and quality is also reflected in the fact that 70% of smartphone users are watching TV on their phones. Reading is listed as something that more than half of tablet users, and 43% of smartphone users, do daily, numbers that almost certainly reflect the devices’ relative screen sizes. As well as online news services, blogs are incredibly popular, and looking at the list of 2014’s most visited blogs gives an idea of what people are interested in – at least while they’re passing an idle moment online.
Blogs
Top of the tree is The Huffington Post, a wide ranging news aggregator/blog covering everything from entertainment to politics. TMZ was second, concentrating on celebrity stories. Business Insider came third, news site Mashable was fourth, and tech site Gizmodo is fifth in the list. When it comes to online reading, it seems people want a broad mix of fresh, newsy content – with perhaps a slight bias towards celeb gossip and entertainment.
What does seem to be true is that what people do online is more and more determined by the tech itself. Fifteen years ago the idea of watching TV or playing online games with high quality graphics on a phone would have seemed crazy. What people will do online ten years from now is partly down to what advances in technology we’ll see.
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