Key Features

The media landscape in the Netherlands still very much includes PC use, though smartphones are now more widespread.

• Smartphone ownership first overtook desktop/laptop ownership in the Netherlands in 2018, according to GlobalWebIndex, and that gap widened to 10 percentage points this year. In H1 2020, 95.0% of internet users ages 16 to 64 owned a smartphone, while 84.9% owned a PC. Tablets, like PCs, posted a marginal decline in ownership, to 56.9%. Yet penetration of both PCs and tablets remains high compared with most countries surveyed. This is to be expected in a small, highly literate nation where most people enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and where PCs were affordable and well established before smartphones.
• That helps to explain why PCs and tablets once again claimed the single-greatest slice of media time among internet users in the Netherlands in H1 2020, at an average of 2 hours, 47 minutes (2:47) per day.
• Last year, broadcast TV ranked second in terms of time spent, at an average 2:18 daily. In H1 2020, that had fallen to 2:12, while time spent with mobile devices rose to 2:14. In other words, mobile time finally exceeded broadcast TV time in H1 2020—and by just 2 minutes.