In India, adults still spend more time with traditional media than digital—by a long shot. eMarketer estimates that this year, the average adult spends about 2.5 times as long each day with traditional media, including TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Adults spend two and a half hours with traditional media each day, according to eMarketer’s first ever forecast of time spent with media in India.
Digital media, meanwhile, gets 1 hour and 6 minutes’ worth of attention from the average adult in India. The time spent with digital media is rising, but won’t approach time with traditional media within the next two years.
However, those figures mask how much time internet users in India really spend online, because they are averages across the whole population of adults, most of whom don’t use the internet at all. eMarketer estimates that this year, for example, just 29.4% of the population uses the internet on a monthly basis.
So while the average adult spends just 46 minutes each day with the internet, the average internet users spends 2 hours and 25 minutes—that is, almost as much time as the average adult spends with traditional media each day.
“While the time spent on the internet only takes up a small share of total media time in India, that is largely due to the low internet penetration,” said eMarketer forecasting analyst Chris Bendtsen. “Among those who have access to the internet, time spent rises sharply but still falls behind other advanced nations. As internet speeds and connectivity improves in India, we expect that time spent on the internet will eventually rise to the levels seen in other countries.”
As India is still a developing country with high poverty rate, low urbanization rate and lack of infrastructure, eMarketer estimates that the total time spent with media time to be 3 hours and 36 minutes in 2016, which is far behind all other countries in our forecast.
