In fact it’s twice as large, and it is growing considerably more quickly than it is through applications.
According to a recently released report from Morgan Stanley, mobile traffic over browsers is a massive 2 times greater than what is being experienced through apps, and it is also growing at a notably faster rate.
This has caused Morgan Stanley to point out in its report that Google is a buy stock and that people should get on that.
The contents of the report are coming as a shock to a large segment of the market, as there was a growing body of evidence that had been suggesting that it was smartphone apps that were winning the mobile traffic race. In fact, previously, it had been suggested that applications were holding onto 80 to 90 percent of our usage time on mobile devices. What is fascinating about this latest report, though, is that both of these claims about traffic over mobile gadgets are actually true.
The most recent report about mobile traffic has been based on comScore data about device usage trends.
This may come as welcome news to companies that have been facing rapidly rising mobile user acquisition costs as a result of the withering of premium in-app inventory. Moreover, brand marketers are also seeing this as very appealing as they are always on the lookout for new opportunities to connect with new customers.
That said, the Morgan Stanley report has caused some confusion as the comScore report upon which the figures were based indicated that about 87 percent of the time that Americans are spending on their devices is in mobile apps. This means that for every ten minutes that are spent on mobile devices, nearly nine of them are in apps. Moreover, that time has grown by 90 percent over the past two years. During that same span of time, mobile web time has increased by 53 percent.
The reason that this appears to be confusion is because of the term mobile traffic. The reason is that comScore’s focus is on time spent, whereas Morgan Stanley is paying attention to the number of unique visitors that are accessing sites through browsers versus the apps on their devices.
