Flurry Analytics tracked 180,000 apps from October 2011 to March 2012 and found an 89% jump in minutes spent on photo and video apps. Next on the list was music, productivity, social networking and entertainment. Consumers spent 87 minutes a month using such apps — including Viddy and Socialcam — in October and 231 minutes in March, according to Flurry. From July to March, meanwhile, time spent rose 166%. (The research did not include stats from Instagram, and Flurry doesn’t break out figures for photo-sharing vs. video-sharing apps.)
Researchers then compared those figures to YouTube’s. What did they find? YouTube still has a big lead, although the video apps are making inroads. Consumers spent 425 minutes, on average, on YouTube in March, which is far ahead of the time spent on mobile photo and video-sharing apps. However, YouTube’s time spent average fell from 472 minutes the month before.
A blog post from Flurry expands on this phenomenon:
“While mobile app video consumption grew more than online consumption, the gap in usage at the end of 2011 was still meaningful. During 2012, however, is where things get interesting. As online video consumption dropped by 10%, mobile video app consumption increased by another 52%.For Flurry, this is just the latest sign of the web’s transition from the social media-dominated era of Web 2.0 to the mobile-first period of Web 3.0. The research company found last June that for the first time consumers were spending more time on mobile apps than on the web. That data supported a hypothesis from Wired in August 2010 declared that “The Web is Dead,” pointing to a shift in consumer usage of the web to apps.
While it cannot be concluded that mobile video apps are cannibalizing YouTube, the shift in time spent between these two platforms appears to be a signal of disruption. Think of it this way: With every mobile video you share of friends, family, vacations, parties and weddings, you are likely loading another bullet in the chamber for Web 3.0. For YouTube, it appears they need to run, outrun your gun.”
A Google rep says YouTube doesn’t see much of a threat from mobile devices: “Developers bringing more video applications to the Web is good thing for consumers.” The rep pointed out that YouTube has more than 3,000 partners using its open API to upload hundreds of thousands of videos every day. Mobile playbacks on YouTube have tripled in the last year to more than 500 million views a day and every minute over three hours of video is uploaded to YouTube from mobile devices. Says the rep: “We continue to invest in this area and developers can expect more improvements in the months ahead.”
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