Global Media Intelligence 2020: Turkey

Key Features

Data from Turkey continues to highlight behavior in a very young, urban population, where mobile is king.

• Smartphone ownership among internet users in Turkey was already close to 98% in H1 2019, according to GlobalWebIndex, and has effectively stabilized this year at 97.9%. PC penetration lags by some 25 percentage points but rose marginally to 72.3% this year. However, tablet penetration declined almost 6 percentage points to 47.3%.
• Time spent with mobile devices significantly outstripped time spent with desktops, laptops, and tablets. On average, internet users ages 16 to 64 spent 4 hours, 21 minutes (4:21) per day with mobile phones, compared with 3:35 on larger-screen devices. However, it’s worth noting that both mobile and PC time rose between H1 2019 and H1 2020. In many other countries that GlobalWebIndex polled, PC time had fallen during that period.
• Smart TVs have a significant presence in Turkey, though penetration fell from 44.6% to 43.4% year over year (YoY). The devices were more popular among females and older adults, but respondents in affluent homes registered the highest penetration at 56.5%. Note that last year, more than 65% of internet users in that cohort owned a smart TV.
• Traditional media still command large audiences. Almost 92% of internet users polled in Q1 2020 had watched live TV in the prior month, and two-thirds had listened to broadcast radio. In fact, penetration of broadcast TV and radio were greater than in H1 2019. Print media is suffering, though. Readership of print newspapers and magazines dropped more than 7 percentage points YoY to 64.3% and 57.5%, respectively. Time spent figures mirror this disparity. In H1 2020, internet users spent a daily average of 2:18 with broadcast TV, compared with just 40 minutes reading print press, per GlobalWebIndex.
• Consumption of time-shifted TV content had changed little since 2019. Some 55.7% of respondents polled in H1 2020 had used a TV channel’s catch-up or on-demand services to view programs, and 51.2% had watched TV shows they recorded earlier.
• By contrast, the share of internet users who watched TV or films via subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services rocketed between H1 2019 and H1 2020, from 57.1% to 68.3%. In total, nearly 89% of respondents in Turkey had streamed free or paid-for TV, film, or other video content in the prior month, GlobalWebIndex reported.
• An estimated 92.0% of internet users were active on social media in the month prior to polling, and time spent on social accounted for more than 3 hours per day on average, according to internet users’ own estimates. As in H1 2019, social media remained well ahead of broadcast TV in time spent.