New Study on Smartphone Ownership and Usage Has Insights
for Media Consumption Trends

On June 21 2012 Edison Research released results of a survey conducted in partnership with Arbitron examining how Americans use smartphones. The study is based upon a national, representative sample of 2,020 Americans age 12 and older. Conducted by telephone in January/February 2012, the study examines demographics, usage and other aspects related to smartphone ownership and mobile behaviors. Below are some media-related aspects of the study of interest to broadcasters.

Smartphones are now mainstream—the study shows 44% of consumers now own smartphones (up from 31% in 2011), 44% own non-smartphone cell phones, and 12% of consumers do not own a cell phone. Demographics for ownership are shown below. More than half of smartphone owners are between the ages of 12 and 34 and 25% are between 45 and 64.

The study is primarily of interest to broadcasters when smartphones are considered as a potential platform for media providers (or conversely as a competitive platform for traditional media). Looking at radio listening at work, 20% of those who listen to radio at work now do so via a smartphone:

Online radio listening in general is much more popular among smartphone owners than non-smartphone owners. While 45% of smartphone owners reported listening to online radio in the last week, only 16% of non-smartphone owners did so:

Internet radio listening in the car via smartphones is also significant:

Television viewing is also examined between those that have smartphones and those that don’t. In the chart below, smartphone users are shown to spend as much time daily on the Internet as they do watching television. Note that non-smartphone owners spend more time watching television on a daily basis. The small amount of time reading newspapers shows a stark contrast with time spent with other media:

Television viewing on a smartphone is a growing trend. Almost one in five smartphone owners have watched TV programming through their phone:

There is a significant amount of other interesting information in the study as well about smartphone users, including more granular demographic data, interest in advanced features such as voice commands and use of social media. In any case, the notion of smartphones as a platform for radio and TV programming is informed by the data in the study. Copies of the full presentation can be downloaded here.

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