Mobile Users Watch Longer Videos On Their Smartphones, Per IAB Survey

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an organization that studies trends in online and mobile advertising. Recently, this group conducted a survey that looks into how videos are viewed on mobile devices by users around the world. 

To absolutely no one's surprise, most of the participants in the survey claim that they are watching more video content than ever via their mobile devices. The IAB's data certainly shows that half of those who took the survey in the United States watched more videos on mobile this year than they did last year. In Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, 42 percent of the respondents said the same.

More interestingly, users are not just watching videos on mobile more often, but they are also watching longer videos. As a matter of fact, 36 of those surveyed stated that they watched videos that are at least five minutes long every day. According to the IAB's data, mobile users in China (the largest mobile market in the world) are voracious watchers of movies and TV episodes on their smartphones. Moreover, 37 percent of those surveyed in China stated that they are watching less TV because they prefer watching videos via their mobile devices. The same goes for 35 percent of those surveyed in Singapore.

In an increasingly mobile driven world, this was bound to happen, of course. And it helps a lot that most smartphones nowadays sport large display screens that allow for better viewing of videos on handsets. Indeed, the recent rapid growth of sales of phablets (phone-tablet hybrid mobile devices) is evidence that people in general love watching videos via their smartphones and more and more users are actually buying large-screened devices so that they can enjoy watching videos even more. 

It is also important to determine how mobile users around the world are finding and accessing videos to be watched on their smartphones. Unsurprisingly, 62 percent of those surveyed claimed that they found video content via YouTube. Meanwhile, 33 percent of those surveyed said they accessed video content via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, 20 percent claimed they found videos by searching, and 14 percent of them said they watched videos via advertising.

The IAB's survey was conducted by On Device Research. The survey was done by talking to 200 smartphone owners in 24 countries, which included Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The 200 smartphone owners who were surveyed in each of these countries were all at least 16 years old of age.