My 24 Hours Income Team Impact: Report: Average App Session Length Is Around 5 Minutes

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Report: Average App Session Length Is Around 5 Minutes

Opera Mediaworks, a mobile ad platform for brands, released new findings that detailed the ways consumers engaged with mobile applications during the third quarter of 2016. The findings showed that users are spending more time in mobile apps each day compared with earlier in 2016.

Specifically, Opera Mediaworks said the amount of time users spent in the top 100 apps on its platform each day in Q3 2016 was 36.9 minutes, up from 33.5 minutes in the second quarter of 2016 and from 30 minutes in the first quarter of the year.

Opera Mediaworks said the average amount of time a user spends in an app during a single session is around five minutes. Games and “media and entertainment” apps account for longer app sessions, while social networking and e-commerce apps account for shorter app sessions. For the top 100 apps on its platform, Opera Mediaworks said the average session time has remained “steady” at “around nine to 10 minutes” throughout 2016.

Elsewhere, Opera Mediaworks found that users are becoming more loyal to specific mobile apps. When looking at the top 100 apps on its platform, the company found that an average user opened the same app “just over four” times per day, on average, in Q3 2016, upfrom an average of approximately 3.6 app sessions per day in both Q1 and Q2 2016.

In a blog post, Falguni Bhuta, vice president of global communications and engagement marketing at Opera Mediaworks, commented:

This is the first significant leap in average session volume since the beginning of the year, and it shows that mobile users are becoming more dedicated to the apps that they use regularly, opening them more frequently and consuming their content more often.

This shift in “mobile app loyalty” demonstrates a shift toward trusted apps, as consumers more deeply integrate the apps with daily utility and entertainment into their digital lives.

Overall, the findings showed that news and information apps led all other app categories in terms of impressions in Q3 2016, with a 28.5 percent market share. These apps were followed by games, which had a 27.7 percent market share for the quarter.

Check out Opera Mediaworks’ complete findings here.