People consumed more media than ever last year — but growth is slowing

People watched, read, listened, streamed and posted more media than ever in 2016, but that consumption plateaued this year, according to data released today by research firm Zenith.

Globally, individuals on average spent 456.1 minutes each day consuming media last year; in 2017, it’s expected to decline slightly to 455.8 minutes.

That suggests we’ve reached peak media, but that’s not the case when you look at the data by regions.

North American media consumption is expected to increase by 1.8 percent this year to 612.4 minutes a day, compared with 601.5 minutes last year.

According to Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith, mobile internet drove our overall media consumption because it turned “what used to be non-media activity (talking to friends and family) to media activity (social media).”

That said, there are only so many hours in the day, so any major increase in consumption is going to have to come from a similarly transformative technology, like in-store shopping somehow becoming a media experience.

Mobile internet consumption increased at an average rate of 44 percent a year between 2010 and 2016 and accounted for 19 percent of all global media consumption last year. Zenith expects it to be 26 percent of all media consumption by 2019.

But as mobile devices have become ubiquitous, that growth is now slowing.

Until now, overall media consumption managed to grow, even as consumption of traditional media including TV, radio and newspapers fell. However, people still spend more time with television than with the internet — but that’s changing fast.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.