LONDON – Last year, London-based global media research firm Zenith projected that in 2019, the amount of time users would spend daily consuming online media would approach the amount of time they spent watching television – marking a major shift in consumption habits over the course of this decade, which began with consumers spending over two hours more watching TV every day than they did surfing the internet, on average.

Zenith now believes it wasn’t aggressive enough with its projections on the increase in internet use, revising the projection to say for the first time, users will spend more time each day consuming online media than televised media.

Next year, Zenith expects people to spend an average of 170.6 minutes consuming online media (which includes a wide variety of activity, including use of social media platforms to view photos and videos shared thereon) versus 170.3 minutes watching television.

As you might expect, the increase in online media consumption is coming in part at the expense of other, more “traditional” media forms.

“Under traditional definitions, all other media are losing out to the mobile internet,” said Jonathan Barnard, the Head of Forecasting and Director of Global Intelligence for Zenith. “But the truth is that the distinctions between media are becoming less important, and mobile technology offers publishers and brands more opportunities to reach consumers than ever.”

Speaking of mobile technology, over the course of the current decade, the biggest increase in online media consumption has come in the mobile sector, which has seen a nearly five-fold jump since 2011.

“The spread of mobile devices and rapid mobile data networks has transformed global media consumption in recent years,” Zenith wrote in a release summarizing the findings of its Media Consumption Forecasts 2018 report. “24% of all media consumption across the world will be mobile this year, up from just 5% in 2011.”

The rapid uptake in mobile use by consumers is forcing business and content creators to rethink their efforts, according to Vittorio Bonori, Zenith’s Global Brand President.

“Mobile technology is challenging brands to rethink how they communicate with consumers,” Bonori said. “Brands need to understand both the consumer’s mind-set and where they sit on the consumer journey, to determine how to communicate with them. By using data, ad tech and now artificial intelligence, brands can co-ordinate their communications across media and mind-sets to move them along the consumer journey most effectively.”

Unsurprisingly, the biggest “losers” in terms of the time people spend consuming media has been in the arena of printed media – but Zenith also noted that for publishers who also distribute their content online, the decline in print consumption is partially offset by people reading the same content online.

“Newspapers and magazines have lost the most – we estimate that between 2011 and 2018 time spent reading them has fallen by 45% for newspapers and 56% for magazines,” Zenith wrote in its report. “However, this refers only to time spent reading printed publications. Time spent reading newspapers and magazines online is included in the internet total, and for many publications the time they have gained online more than makes up for the time they have lost from print.”

Television and radio consumption have declined, as well, but not the same extent as print media. Zenith estimates that between 2011 and 2018, the time spent watching TV dropped by 3%, which time spent listening to the radio declined by 8% over the same period.

Overall, media consumption continues to grow in the aggregate, even with the declines across traditional platforms – a fact Zenith attributes to the rise in mobile consumption, which enables people to “access to essentially unlimited content almost everywhere, and at any time of the day.”

“We estimate that the average person will spend 479 minutes a day consuming media this year, 12% more than in 2011. We forecast the total to reach 492 minutes a day in 2020,” Zenith reported.