Martech: Martech is Marketing Logo
  • Topics
    Digital Transformation
    Marketing Operations
    Data
    Customer & Digital Experience
    Performance Marketing
    Marketing Management
    Special Reports
    MarTech Topics
  • Conference
  • Webinars
  • Intelligence Reports
  • White Papers
  • What is MarTech
    Mission
    Staff
    Newsletter
    Search Engine Land
    Third Door Media

Processing...Please wait.

MarTech » Customer & Digital Experience » Pew: Mobile News Consumption Popular, Majority Still Resists Paying For Digital Subscriptions

Pew: Mobile News Consumption Popular, Majority Still Resists Paying For Digital Subscriptions

Yesterday the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released its Future of Mobile News report. The findings are based on a survey of just over 9,500 US adults this past summer. The purpose of the study was to investigate mobile news reading and consumption habits on tablets and smartphones. Accordingly Pew has found […]

Greg Sterling on October 2, 2012 at 7:48 am

Yesterday the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released its Future of Mobile News report. The findings are based on a survey of just over 9,500 US adults this past summer. The purpose of the study was to investigate mobile news reading and consumption habits on tablets and smartphones.

Accordingly Pew has found that reading news is one of the most popular activities among tablet and smartphone owners, more popular than accessing social networks in some cases.

According to Pew, 22 percent of US adults have a tablet, with more planning to buy one in the next six months. As previously reported, more than 50 percent of US adults own either a tablet or smartphone. And 66 percent of the combined audience consumes news on a mobile device.

Among tablet owners, Pew found that Android and Kindle Fire tablets have substantially gained share since last year when the iPad dominated. These numbers are likely not an entirely accurate reflection of the distribution of tablets in the US — given traffic and usage numbers that have been previously reported. However among Android tablets Kindle Fire represents nearly half of those in the market.

Overall news consumption on mobile devices is up and many mobile news consumers are among the most engaged readers. However there are some challenging trends that the report identifies for the news industry.

In contrast to larger mobile market trends toward apps, a majority of mobile news consumers get their news from the mobile web: “60 percent of tablet news users mainly use the browser to get news on their tablet, just 23 percent get news mostly through apps and 16 percent use both equally.”

App users are more inclined to pay for digital subscriptions. Indeed, large numbers of people are still resistant to paying for digital news. According to Pew, only “19 percent of mobile news users have some kind of digital news subscription: 14 percent bundled with print and 9 percent digital only, with some overlap of those who have both.”

The story of advertising on mobile news sites or in apps is a half-empty or half-full one. It can either be seen as positive or disappointing depending on your perpective. Most digital marketers would be encouraged generally. About half of mobile news users “notice ads” and CTRs are quite high by comparison to online. But beyond this users “rarely act” on these ads, in terms of e-commerce transactions.

In addition most respondents in the Pew survey don’t like ads regardless of the particular medium or “platform.” In contrast to several other mobile user surveys (mostly notably by the IAB) fewer people are receptive to ads on tablets and smartphones vs. other channels.

There are both encouraging and discouraging aspects to the report. However it’s clear that smartphones and tablets are the future of digital news and news more generally. Thus news publishers are compelled to figure out how to make digital subscriptions and mobile advertising work on these devices.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


New on MarTech

    HubSpot customers paying 12% more than in 2021
    Closing your team’s technical gap without hiring
    Marketers want better features from their martech solutions
    AI and machine learning in marketing: Are you deploying the right models? 
    Google, NBCUniversal duking it out to be Netflix adtech provider

About The Author

Greg Sterling
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

Related Topics

Customer & Digital ExperienceMarketing ManagementPerformance Marketing

Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.

Processing...Please wait.

See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS The MarTech Conference logo.

September 28-29, 2022: Fall

Start Training Now: Master Classes

Start Discovering Now: Spring



The SMX Conference logo.

Start Training Now:: SMX Advanced

November 14-15, 2022: SMX Next

March 8-9, 2022: Master Classes

Webinars

Protect Your Paid Advertising Spend Against Ad Fraud and Invalid Traffic

Build an Integrated Search Strategy Across Google, Amazon and YouTube

Get a Jumpstart with Google Analytics 4!

See More Webinars
Intelligence Reports

Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Identity Resolution Platforms

Email Marketing Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

See More Intelligence Reports
Featured White Paper

Digital Marketing Strategy Ebook

See More Whitepapers

Receive daily marketing news & analysis.

Processing...Please wait.

Topics

  • Transformation
  • Operations
  • Data
  • Experience
  • Performance
  • Management
  • All Topics
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech
  • Search Marketing Expo - SMX

About

  • What is MarTech
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • RSS

© 2022 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.