Smartphones are driving all growth in U.S. web traffic, while tablets and computer web access has declined, according to new data from Adobe Analytics.
Smartphones are driving all growth in web traffic
Just not through apps.
George Frey / Getty
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Since January 2015, there has been a 68 percent increase in smartphone web traffic in the U.S., while desktop and tablet both saw declines. Overall, web traffic has been pretty much flat, according to Adobe’s Media & Metrics report that was released Monday. Adobe tracked more than 150 billion visits to or launches of 400 large company sites and apps since January 2015, using anonymous and aggregated data from companies on Adobe Experience Cloud.
On smartphones, 61 percent of websites’ referred traffic — meaning when people don’t go directly to a page but find it through another means — came from Google Search. Another 16 percent came from Facebook. Other sources made up just 23 percent in total.
Accordingly, Google and Facebook are taking the lion’s share of ad dollars.
All that smartphone web traffic, however, hasn’t translated to traffic on smartphone apps. Americans have opened apps 22 percent less on smartphones and nearly 50 percent less on tablets compared with the beginning of 2016. The decline, however, didn’t extend to top apps by Amazon, Google and Facebook, according to Adobe.
News websites — likely due to a presidential administration that can often make major policy announcements on Twitter — benefited the most from smartphone web traffic, compared with the other industries measured.
Where and how consumers view internet content affects where and how advertisers will allocate their spending, since advertising is the backbone of the free web. Accordingly, we can expect to see more of that money head in the direction of mobile advertising.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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