By Indrani Sen
Recently, eMarketer conduced a global survey of the time consumers in different countries spent on media consumption per day. Adult consumers in India will spend 70.1% (3 hours, 30 minutes) of their daily media time on traditional media and remaining 29.9%, or 1 hour and 29 minutes on digital media in 2019 (https://www.emarketer.com/content/india-time-spent-with-media-2019).
A large part of the growth for time spent by Indian adults with digital comes from content consumption that takes place over the mobile internet. This trend will continue till 2021 based on availability of cheaper smartphones, a growing number of smartphone users and affordable data. It is estimated that in 2019, adults will spend 1 hour, 12 minutes online, and the majority of that time (76.5%) will be via mobile devices.
In India, TV takes the largest share of total time spent at 58.7%, or 2 hours, 55 minutes. Digital is the second most popular medium with 1 hour, 29 minutes daily, a little under one-third of media time each day.
In terms of ad expenditure, digital media is lagging behind their market share of daily media time spent. eMarketer forecast that digital and traditional will, respectively, account for 20.8% and 79.2% of media ad spending in India in 2019.
As per the estimates of daily media time spent, the above table shows that by 2021 adult Indians will spent on an average 5 hours and 24 minutes on media consumption. There is head room for growth in the average media time, as adult consumers in many other countries spend 8 to 9 hours on daily media consumption. In some countries, consumers have reached the limit of their time spent on media and year on year there is hardly any growth. For example, consumers in the UK will spend 9 hours, 38 minutes with media in 2019, a 1-minute increase from last year. Similar to the rest of the world, time spent with mobile becomes a major driver of digital growth in UK as shown in the table below.
We can expect in the long run, similar trends in daily time spent on media as reflected in the above table. According to the survey, time spent by consumers with digital and traditional media will continue to grow in tandem in India, but digital will grown at a faster rate from 2019 to 2021. However, it will take Indian consumers probably another decade or more before their average daily time spent on media can touch 8 to 9 hours as the growth of time spent on digital media will depend on spread of broadband across the country.