The Poytner mobile media site recently posted a story by digital media fellow Jeff Sonderman that confirms what you may have discovered with an informal survey of your own friends.
“The average person looking at a smartphone screen...is more likely to come across news from (a media organization) through a Facebook or Twitter app than through (a standard) news app,” writes Sonderman.
Sonderman looked at several recent studies of how mobile phone and tablet users are spending their time and discovered that the studies come to a similiar conclusion: most Americans spend a majority of their time playing games and linking to each other on social networks.
According to a new study published by Flurry Analytics, mobile users play games 49 percent of the time, connect on social networks 30 percent of the time, and look at news apps just 6 percent of the total time.
It’s important to note that Flurry Analytics, for some reason, does not track Facebook usage; if Facebook usage was included, the social networking percentage of the total would almost certainly be larger.
Sonderman looked at a study from Nielsen as well.
Nielsen data cited in its 2011 third quarter report shows about eight of 10 people with Android phones used the Facebook app in a given month. (1)
All this Facebooking and game playing would appear to be bad news for the media industry, and especially for traditional news sites.
Are news apps useless? Sonderman says no - but they appeal to a highly targeted audience. That audience is made up of readers who value newspapers and their online content enough to pay for it.
The fact that most people are playing games and networking on Facebook doesn’t detract from the activity of the core news audience, any more than the fact that more people are watching football on Sunday than are reading the New York Times should discourage the Times.
“Pew Research Center data supports this (2), finding people who use a news app are your “power users,” more likely get news daily, spend more time with news, and more willing to pay,” according to Sonderman.
Although using a dedicated news content app to make a profit may be your goal, it shouldn’t be your whole strategy. “The ultimate goal should be to reach larger mobile audiences and draw them in as new loyal readers,” Sonderman conludes. “You need strong engagement through social media and the mobile Web.”
Flurry Analytics estimates that since 2007, more than 500 million iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have been activated. By the end of 2012, the firm believes that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion. (3)
However, the top 50 apps are always changing, according to the Nielsen survey cited earlier. Who knows - a news app could vault to the top of the heap by the time the next survey is underway. It might happen.
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(1) Nielsen, Applications Playbook (Q3 2011). Nielsen’s Applications Playbook Q3 2011 is based on a survey of 4,705 mobile subscribers who reported having downloaded a mobile app in the past 30 days. The respondents completed an online, self-administered survey in September and early October 2011.
(2) The Pew study surveyed more than 1,000 tablet owners to get specific insight on how iPads and similar devices will shape the future of news.
(3) For mobile application usage, the author of the article cited used Flurry Analytics data, which tracks anonymous sessions across more than 140,000 applications. Flurry estimates this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which was scaled-up accordingly for this analysis. http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage
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