More people reading news on tablets

No surprise to me.

Aug 12, 2013 article:
http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/12/epic-launches-politico-goes-deeper-why-longform-is-flavor-of-the-month/

Even as some evidence suggests that people don’t read long articles online and mobile metrics indicate that people prefer to “snack” on news content on their mobile phones, editors and startups increasingly seem to believe that it is important to place more emphasis on longform reporting.

On Friday, we reported that people are spending considerably more time in mobile news apps than in other apps in general – 4.2 minutes per day compared to 3.2 minutes, according to Localytics.

Less publicized but perhaps ultimately more important, however, Localytics found that people spend 50 times more time accessing news app content on tablets than they do on mobile phones.

Those numbers back up Pew’s 2012 findings that tablet owners read more news and longer articles, as well as a study by Bowker Market Research and Book Industry Study Group that shows tablets are becoming the preferred e-reading devices.

Tablet ownership in the US is also growing fast – 44 percent of American households now have a tablet, up from 30 percent in 2012, according to Magid Media Futures.

The more connected reading devices there are in the world, the more opportunities there are for publishers to find readers that previously would have been difficult to access.

Future Web design for content-heavy websites may be tablet first and then downward for smartphones and upward for laptops and desktops.

tablets are the killer news devices

After studying the behavior of people on 100 million devices across 500 mobile news apps from July 2012 to July 2013, Localytics has found that news apps are becoming an increasingly important part of the daily media consumption diet, even as habits shift towards shorter, sharper bursts of activity.

The number of times people open their news apps has grown by 39 percent year-over-year, according to Localytics, from 18 times per month to just more than 25 times per month. Simultaneously, however, session lengths have decreased by 26 percent.

Despite the shorter reading times, people are spending more time in news apps over the course of a day than most other apps.

The study also found that people spend far more time accessing news app content on tablets than on mobile phones – 50 times more time, in fact. And the lion’s share of social sharing comes not through Facebook or Twitter but through private messages.

As it turns out, 80 percent of content shares from apps happen by email.

These findings demonstrate an important trend for people in the news business, showing that people prefer to “snack” on news on their smartphones, but that tablets offer the ultimate “lean back” experience for more in-depth news consumption. (Circa’s ears, no doubt, will be pricking up, and Yahoo may well be congratulating itself on its Summly acquisition.)

#desing - #media - #tablet