Google, Facebook No. 1, others gaining
TORONTO — Google and Facebook continue to be the juggernauts that dominate how Canadians use the Internet but a new “non-duopoly” trend may be emerging, suggests a report by the measurement firm comScore.
When looking at how Canadians used the internet throughout 2017, growth in time spent with the Top 100 most popular online properties excluding Facebook and Google sites was consistently strong.
“What we’re starting to see in Canada is folks outside out those two are showing some increases ... there’s a growth outside of the duopoly,” said Bryan Segal, comScore’s vice-president of sales, in advance of Thursday’s release of the Global Digital Future in Focus report. “Time on the internet is not decreasing, it’s just you see there’s other channels [growing] and time is being proportioned [there]. There’s definitely a shift.”
Earlier this year, Facebook reported that it saw its numbers of daily active users in the U.S. and Canada decline for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, the growing social media platform Snapchat was highlighted in the comScore report for its growth.
While Snapchat has not yet cracked the Top 5 apps used by the most Canadians — those are Facebook, FB Messenger, YouTube, Google Search and Google Maps — it is No. 5 in the U.S. and U.K.
But among Canadian users, Snapchat accounted for more than 10 per cent of the overall time spent on social media apps, more than Instagram and Twitter combined (although Facebook was still far and away the leader at approaching 80 per cent).
Segal said he wasn’t surprised by Snapchat’s growth and “significant slice” of the market, given the app’s younger base of users.
“The core population Snapchat goes after is a highly, highly digitized millennial audience that is severely app-focused ... and they spend a lot of time [online],” he said.
The comScore report looks at digital trends in 13 markets, including Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S., and found that while there’s a global shift toward “mobile-only” consumers who have stopped using computers, Canadians were still keen users of laptops and desktops.
A little over 10 per cent of the Canadian market was mobile-only as of December 2017, an increase of 4.8 percentage points over the course of the year. Meanwhile, mobile-only users represented about 30 to 40 per cent of the markets in Brazil, Italy, Mexico and Spain, and nearly 80 per cent in India.