How Americans spend Mobile Internet Time: A New Look. Nielsen applies a wide variety of methodologies to derive insights from our data for clients and the marketplace on what consumers watch. Our recently published “What Americans Do Online” article produced a fantastic level of interest, including questions and suggestions about other ways to look at the data. Since this is how we typically work with clients, collaborating on how to get to the best analysis, we acknowledge that data alone doesn’t always provide the complete picture.

The following alternative analysis, comparing category and site-level data, for example, shows the different insights made possible by alternate approaches and interpretations. We have long taken pride in our leadership in measurement science and our participation in rich debate around methodology to arrive at the best insight possible. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation to develop new ways to look at measurement both online and in the mobile arena.

For the mobile element of the research, our original share of time analysis used the average time spent at a category-level, the broad groupings of websites that offer similar types of content. This time we went to a more granular level, looking at share of time by basing it on the total time at the individual site-level.