The COVID-19 pandemic has truly brought in a lot of changes in the consumption behaviour of the Indian TV viewing audience over the past few weeks.
BARC and Nielsen’s report titled Crisis Consumption: An Insight Series into TV, Smartphones and audiences show the difference in consumption patterns of consumers from the Pre-COVID period that is 11th January to 31st January to during-COVID period of 21st March to 27th March 2020.
How has the Smartphone Behaviour evolved in week 2 of COVID-19 disruption?
In week 1 of COVID-19 disruption, the time spent on a smartphone had increased by 1.5 hours, in week 2, the time spent has increased by almost 3 hours. In the below-mentioned table, the time spent in week 1 increased by 6% and in week 2 it increased with a massive number of 12%.
Social Distancing leads to more usage on smartphone
While the only vaccine available to beat coronavirus is social distancing, we still are connected with our work and friends through digital mediums.
Chat and VOIP didn’t show any change and remained constant with 98% users in the Pre-COVID period and the COVID disruption week 1 and 2.
Time spent on Social networking platforms and chatting/VOIP platforms such as Zoom etc increased. Social Network saw a 25% increase from 193 minutes to 242 minutes from pre-COVID week to COVID disruption week 1, which then increased to 274 minutes to week 2. A total increase from Pre-COVID period to week two of the Covid-19 disruption was a staggering 42%.
News Apps keeping us updated!
Digital consumption of News continues to show huge increase, consumers are seen spending more time on News applications.
In week 2 of the COVID disruption, the time spent increased by 45%, not just news apps but also the news websites were also visited by 26% more users while the number of website visits per user went up by 42%.
Regional News applications witnessed the highest change in time spent with 111%, followed by Hindi language based applications with 64%. According to the latest data from BARC and Nielsen report, News websites too achieved a major growth, with a whopping increase of users from 17% to 47%. Hindi news leads the news website category with an increase of 33%. Multi-language news websites too saw a 16% increase.
This research is based on Nielsen Smartphone Panel representing 1L+, NCCS ABC, 15-44.
