Categories: Articles

The One Thing You Should Pay Attention To

People hated Wired Magazine for saying that "the Web is dead." Think they were wrong?

The article, The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet, was published in Wired Magazine in September 2010 and it caused a flurry of conversation (online and off). It’s not even a year later and the news item, Flurry: Time Spent On Mobile Apps Has Surpassed Web Browsing, was published on TechCrunch this past week. So, we’re spending more time on mobile apps than we are on Web browsing.

Still think that the Web isn’t dead?

OK, that last line was a red herring, but this is a huge shift in media that begs for you attention. From the TechCrunch article:

"Flurry says that daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web. This compares to 66 minutes on mobile apps daily in December of 2010, and 70 minutes spent daily on the web. And June, the average user spent just under 43 minutes a day using mobile applications versus an average 64 minutes using the Internet. Flurry says that the growth in mobile app usage is a result of more sessions during the day per user, as opposed to an increase in session length. So basically, users are checking Twitter and Foursquare more often as opposed to spending more time in the apps in any given session."

Whether or not the numbers in this report are perfect isn’t relevant. Let’s say that mobile apps usage is the same as Web browsing… or even a little less, you can’t deny the rapid ascent and what this means as more of our world becomes untethered. If you couple this with IDC‘s recent statistic that more smartphones were sold in Q4 of last year than PCs, this shift is happening at a fast and furious pace.

It feels like Marketers are unprepared… or am I being too hard on our industry?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.