Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

The Night Time Is the Right Time for Watching TV, Surfing the Web, Playing With Apps

You might not be working at the end of the day, but you’re probably pretty busy: The evening hours are the peak time for TV viewing, Web surfing and playing with iPhone and Android apps. Probably all at the same time.

Check out this chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company that overlaid its data on top of an earlier chart produced by New York Times digital exec Michael Zimbalist for Advertising Age:

Important to note that the line graph doesn’t compare total audience, but “the proportion of consumers reached during a given hour on that respective medium.”

Flurry’s point is to show that mobile app use is comparatively higher than Internet and TV use during the day. Which makes sense — you may not always be in front of a PC from 6 am to 6 pm, and if you’re employed you probably don’t get a lot of TV-watching done during that time, either.

But I’m still struck by the peak evening use for all three mediums. I think you can file this away in two categories: “Growing evidence that we spend a lot of time watching TV while playing with other devices” and “Growing evidence that a lot of our ‘mobile’ use happens at home.”

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik