Comscore Snapshots: online entertainment in Europe

Top line observations:

Table 1: Consumers spend almost four times as much time accessing entertainment content on mobile devices than they do on Desktop devices. In December 2020, consumers spent an average of 932 minutes on entertainment sites or apps (i.e. roughly half an hour per day). This compares with 247 minutes spent on desktop devices. What’s more, the share of time on mobile devices continues to grow at a rapid clip: year-on-year it went up by over 15%, whereas on desktop devices it remained relatively flat (-1.3%).

Table 2: The Entertainment category appears to be relatively crowded. This is because the market supports a mix of online pure plays (e.g. Netflix, Dailymotion, Spotify, YouTube) and national broadcasters, (for example BBC iPlayer in the UK, TF1 in France, ARD in Germany, RAI in Italy, and RTVE in Spain). In the UK, the large number of tabloids and news-outlets that focus on entertainment news and celebrity news also contribute to increase the size of the Entertainment category, more so than in other countries.

Table 3: Looking at the rankings of Entertainment media in each EU5 country, we see that competition between global pure plays and national media is alive and kicking: YouTube comes on top in almost all EU5 markets, but more granular data for each country reveals that in France, Germany, Italy and Spain a healthy mix of national champions occupy many of the top spots.

Table 1. Time spent on entertainment sites and apps

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Dec 2020, EU5 region.

Table 2. Market competitiveness of entertainment sites and apps

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Dec 2020, EU5 region.

Table 3 Selection of top online entertainment sites or apps with highest % reach in each region (excludes YouTube)

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Dec 2020, EU5 region.