As consumers around the world spend more time online, new research from Comscore, a trusted partner for planning, transacting, and evaluating media across platforms, reveals increasing engagement levels on mobile devices as online categories affected by the COVID-19 pandemic begin to recover and digital video consumption rises.

This research comes from Comscore’s 2020 Global State of Mobile report, which uses Comscore’s mobile and multi-platform data to explore mobile trends and behaviors and the impact of COVID-19 on brands and online categories on mobile across 25 countries.

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“Due to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, we have seen a major shift in where consumers are spending their time on mobile,” said Andrea Sangalli, Product Management Analyst, International Markets, Comscore. “When the height of the initial lockdowns peaked in April 2020, audiences shifted their focus to more local issues, like politics, which saw a 60% increase in unique visitors from August 2019 to April 2020. However, we have started to see a rebound in affected categories between April 2020 and August 2020 as lockdowns were eased: unique visitors to the hotel/resort and home-sharing category dropped by 59% from August 2019 to April 2020 but increased 65% from April 2020 to August 2020.”

“Not only are we seeing an impact on category visitation, but we are also seeing an increase in mobile video consumption across the U.S.,” said Kelly Lewis, Product Manager, Digital Audience, Comscore. “With the explosion of streaming service choices and user-generated short-form video in the past few years, we found the total time spent viewing videos on mobile increased by 65% from August 2017 to August 2020. In fact, mobile video growth actually outpaced desktop growth, which saw an increase of 21% over the same time period. We expect mobile video consumption to maintain its strong platform position in the years to come.”

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Other key findings from the State of Mobile report include:

• Globally, time spent on mobile continues to rise, despite the increased time spent at home due to COVID-19 restrictions. 79% of total digital minutes in the U.S, were spent on mobile in August 2020, up from 78% in August 2019. In Mexico, 89% of total digital minutes were spent on mobile in August 2020, up from 83% during that same period in August 2019. India had the largest share of mobile minutes, making up 93% of total digital minutes in August 2020.
• As on-the-go behaviors became limited in the U.S., the food and grocery category saw declines in multi-platform reach from 53% to 47% from August 2019 to August 2020. However, on mobile, U.S. consumers flocked to delivery-based food and grocery apps and since April 2020, retailer-based food app usage has seen a rebound.
• In the U.S., the share of digital retail dollars spent on mobile has reached 31% of total digital retail dollars spent in Q2 2020, up from 16% in Q2 2015. Mobile buyers are also buying more frequently, as the average number of purchases in a month increased from 2 in Q2 2019 to 4.5 in Q2 2020.

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