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.)

The findings might also cause the likes of BuzzFeed and Upworthy, which are optimized for maximum social sharing, to consider reconfiguring their editorial calculus in order to better account for sharing via email.

Localytics’ figures supplement those of Pew Research, which has found that Americans’ daily news-reading habits are becoming increasingly mobile in general, with half of the country’s smartphone owners and 56 percent of tablet owners using their phones for news in 2012. Pew also reported that the most common way people get news is by going directly to a news organization’s website or app. Meanwhile, a recent survey by Foresee.com also found that people prefer their mobile devices over PCs when it comes to reading news.

It's fascinating how popular e-mail has become or re-become over the past few years. Maybe e-mail never went out of style, but according to the tech press back around 2004-2006, it appeared e-mail was a gonner for many people for communication.

But e-mail is still big for business. With the explosion of social media and social networking, e-mail has become big for receiving updates. People subscribe to e-mail newsletters and digests.

E-mail, the relatively old, pre-Web tech is still going strong.

For content-heavy producers:

• provide a tablet optimized website and/or native app
• focus on news (define "news")
• focus on snippets of content for smartphone users
• focus on the longform versions of content for tablet users
• employ e-mail where feasible: receive updates, share with others

#design - #media - #tablet - #email