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COVID-19 is Reshaping our Internet Habits

Tech Trends	1935 VIEWS
Tech Trends
1935 VIEWS

Friday, April 17, 2020 / 9.57AM / By Kateryna Vasylenko of NYTimes / AngelList / Header Image Credit: Edutopia

The coronavirus pandemic is changing how we work, study, digest news, and entertain ourselves. We've put together a quick breakdown of the biggest changes by vertical:

App store spend is up: Q1 2020 was the largest-ever quarter in terms of consumer spend on apps, according to data from App Annie. Consumers worldwide spent over $23 billion through app stores.

Social app usage is exploding: Daily downloads of Houseparty have risen 25x. The video chat app was downloaded over 650,000 times on March 25.

Collaboration apps are now household names: Worldwide daily downloads of Zoom's mobile app have increased by 14x since February 15. Video conferencing apps saw a record 62 million downloads during a single week in March.

People are hungry for news: Web traffic to nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com has grown more than 50 percent over the last month, according to SimilarWeb.

Esports are thriving: Watch hours on Twitch have increased by 23%. Watch hours on YouTube Gaming Live increased by 10.7% and on Facebook Gaming by 3.8%. Twitch surpassed 3 billion hours watched on the platform in Q1 2020.

Go read this report on how the pandemic has changed the internet

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Source: NYTIMES

A New York Times analysis of internet usage in the United States from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, two online data providers, reveals that the behaviors shifted, sometimes starkly, as the virus spread and pushed people to the devices for work, play and connecting.

Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off, as their websites have grown.
As people want to see one another - its has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google's video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty; and led to a renewed interest in Nextdoor, the social media site focused on connecting local neighborhoods.
As the offices and schools of America have all moved into the basements and living rooms - meetings are happening on Zoom, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams.
Amid the uncertainty about how bad the outbreak could get, Americans appear to want few things more than the latest news; and the biggest beneficiaries from the situation are local news sites, with huge jumps in traffic as people try to learn how the pandemic is affecting their hometowns.
With all major-league games called off, the use of ESPN's website has fallen sharply since late January; at the same time, several video game sites have had surges in traffic, as have sites that let you watch other people play.