The television has long been an American staple, capturing the majority of our stray attention and influencing a great deal of our buying habits and consumption patterns.  But that tide is changing.  Thanks to a recent study done by Flurry, a mobile ad network owned by Yahoo, we now know that Americans are spending more of their time and attention glued to mobile apps than TV shows.  This is big news for the internet marketing industry and any business hoping to capture a few seconds of audience attention.

According to the study, mobile time went up by 9.3% this year while TV time stayed the same.  Most of this surge in mobile use is in the app market, not simple web surfing.  It’s not just the top 25 apps that are getting this attention either, it’s everything else.  In the time period of the study, the top 25 apps grew in consumer usage by 1% while the other some 590,000 applications available in the app marketplace saw an increase of 21% in usage time.   So much for those big app developers trying to corner and consolidate the app market.

Developers have been racing to grab this booming mobile market for nearly a decade and have managed to build apps faster in that time period than their predecessors were spitting out new website back in the early 2000s.  And the public is thanking them for it by spending money on apps that do everything from offer news to social networking to increased productivity and organization.   With so much custom functionality and the ability to tailor your small pocket screen to your own unique lifestyle, it’s no wonder we “People of the Screen” have shifted our focus from the TV set to the mobile screen.

This means big changes for business and advertising.  Western phenomena like multi-million dollar Super Bowl ads and half hour infomercials may be on the decline as marketers and advertisers find new ways to reach the mobile public.  While the big ad agencies and broadcast networks will work fervently to keep their (rather large) share of the pie, it’s already evident that the future belongs to the independent agencies and developers of the world who can respond faster to public demand than the larger conglomerates.

Let’s just hope we still get Doritos commercials during football.

Otherwise, what is there to live for?

Kidding.

There’s always Farmville.

Erving

Incredible Marketing

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