Nielsen Study: Higher-Income Households Own More Devices, But Lower-Income Households Spend More Time With Devices

Study

NIELSEN's latest Total Audience Report for third quarter 2015 looked at the effect of income on device ownership and media use, and drew some surprising conclusions.

In the study, while, as expected, higher-income households tend to own more different kinds of media devices and subscribe to more services, lower-income users turn out to spend more time with every device that they use than high-income households, whether legacy devices or newer technology.

“We expected high-income households to own more devices, but we did not anticipate that low-income consumers of all devices had greater usage,” said NIELSEN SVP Audience Insights GLENN ENOCH. “The media behavior of low-income adults may be concentrated in fewer devices, resulting in more minutes of usage for the devices they own, while high-income adults distribute their time among more devices.”

Looking at total media use among adults, radio, as well as TV-connected devices, remained stable at all income levels, which NIELSEN said makes radio "a potentially solid marketing investment."

See more about the study here.

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