Global Media Intelligence 2019: Colombia

Key Features

Social media platforms enjoy massive reach—and claim many hours of internet users’ digital time spent.

• More than nine in 10 web users polled in Colombia during H1 2019 had accessed social media in the prior month—a rise of several percentage points since H1 2018, according to GlobalWebIndex.
• When calculating the average time spent with social media, GlobalWebIndex found that internet users spent 3 hours, 39 minutes (3:39) per day with social in H1 2019. (GlobalWebIndex includes YouTube in its social media calculations, which tends to boost usage and time spent figures.)
• The majority of Colombia’s internet users still makes time for print media. About 70% said they had read a print newspaper in the prior month, while around 68% had read a print magazine. Though it appears consumers are spending less time per day with print content. The daily average devoted to print was 37 minutes, well below the 58 minutes respondents spent with digital titles.

Smartphone penetration is exceptionally high in Colombia, but feature phones are still common.

• Over 97% of internet users ages 16 to 64 owned a smartphone in 2019, while 14.4% owned a feature phone. As in Brazil, near-universal smartphone ownership in Colombia helps to account for significant time spent on mobile phones—estimated at 4:35 each day, on average.
• As of H1 2019, 78.6% of internet users in Colombia owned a PC, while just fewer than four in 10 owned a tablet. Respondents also recorded more than 4 hours per day with PCs/tablets, with social networking being a big driver.
• Smartphone ownership may also be encouraging voice search. Some 41.2% of respondents used voice assistants like Siri and Cortana at least once per month; uptake was higher among males than females (45.0% and 37.6%, respectively). Respondents living in affluent homes were more likely to be voice assistant users as well, at 55.0%.