I
t would not surprise most people to learn that teenagers love their smartphones. Teens spend a lot of time on their smart devices, roughly 3 and a half hours a day, according to data from GlobalWebIndex.
Of the teens who spent over 3 hours on their smartphone, 71% of the respondents spent most of that time watching videos on apps such as YouTube and Netflix. 52% of the respondents spent the majority of their time on messaging apps. 51% of respondents spent their time on social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram. 42% of the respondents said that they spent a lot of their time playing games on their phones.
Mark Dolliver, an eMarket analyst, thinks that teens spend so much of their time on their smartphones because it is most likely the first big-ticket item they get that is specifically theirs. Teens may spend a lot of time on desktop computers, but those devices are typically shared computers. The phone is the teenager’s own personal device that they can use whenever they please.
It is interesting to note that the average time teens spend online is only 48 minutes more than the worldwide average. This means that the perceived conception that teens spend far more time on their smartphones than adults do is barely true. 48 minutes is not a lot of time difference, which means that adults love their smartphones just as much as teens do.