TAKEAWAY: It’s only 8 days into 2014, but tablet news consumes a lot of our attention—as it should.
It’s good news for publishers, according to an eMarketer report which confirms that mobile ad spending boom is here. Mobile, the report states, drove nearly all digital advertising growth in 2013, and is expected to expand this year.
Mobile includes tablets, of course, and, an Ad Age interview with Jason Baptiste, the founder and CMO of mobile publishing platform Onswipe, offered some insights into tablets that are not surprising. Two of those are:
9 p.m. is the iPad’s busiest hour
From the beginning, iPads have been a dominant presence in our evening reading/information consuming routine. Now we can get more specific: the busiest hour on the iPad is 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern Time, according to Mr. Baptiste.
This pretty much confirms what we have seen in focus groups around the world, except that we also see the tablet as a more inclusive platform used throughout the day, but for shorter periods of time. Publishers should be aware of that, dispensing shorter items throughout the day, then offering longer pieces for more lean back, thoughtful reading after 9 p.m., and, as Mr. Baptiste, suggests from midnight to 1 a.m. (You will not finding anything thoughtful other than sleeping at that time, but, apparently I am not a member of that large group of users who are sharing bedtime with their iPads).
Men’s lifestyle content is the iPad’s most engaging
Now this is surprising news, but good to know. “iPad owners love men’s lifestyle content, spending 5 minutes and 43 seconds on site when visiting that type of content, the longest time among 16 categories Onswipe measured,“ says the Ad Age piece.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands
As I am spending this week in Amsterdam, working with the team of De Telegraaf, I am particularly interested to read that tablet and digital news consumption in the Netherlands is growing rapidly.
In December 2013, the majority of the Dutch population owned a tablet. And one in three people uses this device for news, several times a week. Other trends that accelerate digital news consumption are the widespread use of news alerts and the confrontation with news items on social media.
Not surprising, however, “The majority of the Dutch use both news print and online news. The group that uses only newsprint has shrunk to 20%.“
The Dutch have traditionally been among the world’s most loyal newspaper readers. I remember that, during the 1980s, when the average time spent by an American reading a four-section daily newspaper was about 23.3 minutes, it was 37.5 for their Dutch counterparts.
However, my work with Dutch newspapers in recent years leads me to believe that here, too, we have witnessed an erosion of print newspaper readership, but a tremendous increase in those who get their news digitally.
Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/research/post.cfm/growth-of-tablets-redefines-news-consumption-overnight#ixzz2pjFYMs6e