People in China have a lot to say.
That comes from recent research indicating that “mobile messaging takes up a lot of smartphone time in China, where the average user has significantly increased time spent with their device in the past year.”
The data comes from QuestMobile, a China-based big data service provider focused on the mobile internet. According to the firm, instant messaging (IM) accounts for a larger share of the time its users spend with smartphones than any other activity.
Interestingly, more than a third of all smartphone time was devoted to IM in China in December, 2015.
Online video? It’s big in the U.S. — and growing — but in China, it came in second. In fact, it ranked with less than half as much time as IM, or 16 percent of the total. Mobile browsing came in slightly behind video with 15 percent.
“QuestMobile also reported that average time spent with smartphones was 2.4 hours per day in December, up 41.4 percent over the average of 1.7 hours per day its users spent with smartphones in December 2014,” reports eMarketer. “Earlier research indicates that internet users in China ages 45 and younger spend more time with mobile devices than the worldwide average, though older users are somewhat behind by this metric.”
Perhaps the Chinese prefer to peruse video on desktop.
“Online video may be only the second-largest slice of mobile time according to QuestMobile, but it was No. 1 in time spent online with desktop and laptop computers in China. A third of PC internet time went to online video in June 2015,” according to the research.
In sum, China’s population of mobile phone messaging users is mammoth. Reports indicate it will reach 430.4 million this year, up 9.9 percent.
