Households in UK use 7.4 internet devices: study

Households in the UK use 7.4 internet devices  and 40 per cent had purchased a tablet in the last year, a recent survey revealed.

A YouGov poll of over 2,000 UK consumers found that smartphones were the most common internet-devices, followed by laptops and tablets in that order.

The poll revealed that on average, there were 1.7 smartphones, 1.3 laptops, and 1.2 tablets with each household.

The proportion of households owning at least one tablet was 70 per cent, with a fifth owning two and 11 per cent owning three or more.

According to the poll:

• 51 per cent said without the internet or mobile phones, banking and finance would be areas of their lives that would be most impacted. 
• Keeping up with current events (42 per cent), shopping (38 per cent), would be the affected while 37 per cent felt relationships with friends and family would be other aspects that would suffer.
• The survey further found that the average UK citizen who was online would be willing to pay up to £1.53 a month for email service, £1.33 to use search engines, £1.10 for video content, 92p for news websites, 88p for social media, 55p for online games and 52p for price comparison sites.
• With smartphones accounting for nearly eight in 10 (78 per cent) handsets, mobile advertising was up 63 per cent to £1.62 billion in 2014.
• Mobile now accounted for 23 per cent of all digital advertising spend – up from 16 per cent in 2013.

''Advertisers are increasing their digital budgets to reach people as they go online through an increasing array of devices,'' said Tim Elkington, chief strategy officer at the Internet Advertising Bureau.

''It's a win-win for consumers, because digital advertising pays for the wide range of free online services they increasingly rely on in their daily lives, but don't necessarily want to pay much for.''