UK Time Spent with Media 2019

Executive Summary

Consumers have reached a media consumption limit in the UK. People are now shifting certain traditional habits onto digital platforms, and consuming media more than ever on smartphones.

How much time do UK adults spend consuming media each day?

Time spent with media will inch up by 1 minute this year, to 9 hours and 38 minutes (For simplicity’s sake, our style for expressing such a number in the text that follows will be 9:38.). That will increase by 2 minutes in 2020, to 9:40, when it will then plateau.

What proportion of time will be spent consuming media via digital means?

The shares of time spent watching broadcast TV on a TV set or reading print newspapers, are declining, and digital media consumption is picking up the slack. In 2019, such consumption will account for 54.7% of time spent with media, up from 52.4% last year.

What’s mobile’s influence on the digital total?

Mobile will be a significant driver of digital growth. And within mobile itself, daily time spent with media on smartphones will be the only category in our forecast to experience persistent growth, up 11.3% this year.

How much video are UK adults consuming, and how are they consuming it?

Video is emblematic of some of the larger trends present in our time spent forecast—traditional may be declining, but digital consumption of similar content is offsetting those declines. Overall video time will remain largely static across our forecast.

Is social media time plateauing, too?

No, it will experience small increases throughout our forecast, driven by smartphone usage. However, growth isn’t coming from Facebook. Instead, other mobile-first and video-heavy platforms are catching the attention of UK adults.

WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report features our latest forecast for UK time spent with media, broken down by traditional and digital consumption. It also examines what’s driving changes in consumption habits among UK adults.

KEY STAT: Among users of each medium, time spent is either flat or declining, with the exception of smartphone time, which is expected to surpass 4 hours daily by 2021.

Behind the Numbers

eMarketer’s methodology for its UK time spent with media forecast is based on an analysis of 1,144 metrics from 66 sources. This analysis involves the collection of third-party data—primarily survey data—from adult respondents, asking them about their media use habits. Data is also sourced from online and mobile activity tracking services, government data and interviews with industry experts.

Using a bottom-up analysis, we assess and analyze reported time spent with each device and media activity across various sources. And where definitions differ, the data is normalized and interpreted in terms of our definition (i.e., the UK population ages 18 and older). The data is then aggregated with the time contributions from each device and media type to arrive at an estimate for average time spent with media per day.

In order to arrive at forecasts for growth rates by media and by device, this analysis is followed by extensive assessments of historical and expected future growth patterns with regard to device adoption, multiple and overlapping device usage, population and demographic factors and competitors to existing devices and activities.