Friday, June 28, 2013

National survey finds Americans say tablets make them smarter

SOURCE Next Issue Media
Majority of Americans want to be seen as "someone-in-the-know" among their peers, with many even pretending to know about a news story to impress others.
According to the survey, Americans want to be in-the-know about current events, and most (54 percent) prefer to be known as a "newsie" among their friends, more than a sports buff, fashionista or celebrity gossip.  And a majority of Americans (56 percent) believed they were more knowledgeable about current events compared to their friends – 65 percent of men and 48 percent of women felt this way. Owning a tablet may be one way to boost your news-confidence. Sixty-nine percent of tablet owners felt they knew more about current events than their friends, compared to 47 percent of non-tablet owners.
Looking to impress
But are these "newsies" really telling the truth? To look well-informed, some people will go as far as lying. More than one in three (37 percent) have pretended to know about a news story to impress someone else. Tablet owners may feel more pressure to be well-informed because of the media resources at their disposal, as 52 percent of tablet owners admitted to lying about a story to impress someone else, versus 27 percent of non-tablet owners.
Americans like a good argument
Seventy percent of Americans will find any opportunity to argue with their friends about what's in the news cycle regardless of topic. Politics was the primary subject for debate with 49 percent of survey respondents. Sports came in second with 32 percent, followed by award show results (13 percent) and fashion trends (12 percent). Arguing aside, an overwhelming majority of Americans (94 percent) have discussed current events with their family, and 82 percent said they discuss current events topics frequently...
http://wsav.membercenter.worldnow.com/story/22688003/national-survey-finds-americans-say-tablets-make-them-smarter

Monday, June 24, 2013

HTML5 Has Place In App World?

onlinemediadaily reporting:
Where does HTML5 fit in an app world? That’s the question raised in a new NPD Group report examining the role of the mobile Web, specifically HTML5 technology, in a mobile ecosystem dominated by applications.

The study suggests that mobile Web proponents should focus on showcasing compelling use cases for HTML5 and building “hybrid apps,” to move the ball forward.
Linda Barrabee, research director of NPD’s Connected Intelligence service and author of “This is an App’s World: Can HTML5 Rejuvenate the Mobile Web?” points out the Web programming language has long been heralded as a way to overcome the fragmentation inherent in mobile technology. But “the technology is not quite ready for prime time and mainstream adoption,” she stated in a blog post.
This is underscored by companies like Facebook and LinkedIn that are ditching HTML5 in favor of native code for their mobile apps to improve performance and offer a better user experience. That’s why apps have typically been the default option for media companies, retailers and brands to extend their content and drive commerce on mobile devices.
Mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time with apps. Data from Nielsen’s latest cross-platform report showed that smartphone owners devoted 87% of their time to apps versus 13% on the mobile Web, while iPad users spent 76% of their time with apps, compared to 24% surfing online.
Still, the NPD report indicates there are areas where people opt for the mobile Web over apps, such as checking the news and visiting retail sites. Web and app use are also about even when it comes to mobile banking. Apps have only a slight lead over mobile Web sites in search and social networking.

Magazines' iPad Editions See 24% Ad Boost in Q1

Kantar/PIB Report Shows Uptick, But Buyers Seek More Performance Data From Publishers

Magazine publishers are seeing more advertisers warm up to their iPad editions.
In the first quarter, the number of ad units in magazines' iPad editions jumped 23.6% from the same period in 2012, according to a report from Kantar Media and the Publishers Information Bureau. The report, which looked at 58 magazines with monitored print and iPad editions, found that the number of ad pages in the titles' print editions was roughly flat in the first quarter, with 10,707. But the number of iPad ad units climbed to 5,961 in 2013 from 4,824 the year prior. Total print ad pages and iPad ad units combined increased 7.5% year-over-year, the report said.

Bloomberg Businessweek's tablet edition
Magazines reported paid and verified digital circulation of 7.9 million in the second half of last year -- just 2.4% of their total print and digital circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. That number does not include every non-replica edition because some publishers don't report them to the AAM.
One impediment for iPad ads is cost. There are more production costs required for interactivity, and some publishers, including Condé Nast and Meredith, have charged advertisers for interactive elements.
But more print advertisers are opting in, said Chris Kevorkian, chief marketing officer at the MPA-Association of Magazine Media. "There's real growth in marketers saying "Let's move on, let's go into this platform.'"
Tablet ownership in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the past year, with 34% of American adults owning a tablet, up from 18% a year ago, according to the Pew Research Center. With 56% of these tablet owners living in households that earn at least $75,000 annually, publishers are pitching brands on reaching affluent audiences...

 

How Mobile Is Shaping Global Digital Behavior

eMarkter reporting:

Tablets are producing high levels of engagement

Around the world, web users are surfing the internet on ever-more devices. A GlobalWebIndex survey of 180,000 web users in 31 countries found that as of Q1 2013, three out of five respondents accessed the internet on a mobile phone, and 22% used a tablet. That’s in addition to the steady percentage of internet users—about 93%—who’ve been using a personal desktop or laptop for the past couple of years.
Google continues to dominate as the leading web brand or app among both smartphone and tablet users, with 72% of smartphone users accessing Google sites or apps vs. 66% of tablet users doing the same. Facebook came in second, accessed by about half of smartphone and tablet users—while YouTube and Yahoo! ranked third and fourth, respectively. Where behavior began to diverge was in the higher incidence of tablet users accessing Amazon, Skype, MSN/Windows Live and Bing compared with smartphone users.
Amazon’s greater penetration rate among tablet users points to the device’s growing role in digital purchasing. While tablet users were actually 1 percentage point less likely to shop on the device when compared with mobile users, they were more likely than either mobile or PC users to review a product or brand in more depth, purchase an online service, use a group-buying website for a transaction, and even sell a product...
When it came to entertainment, the rank of activities was the same across devices. Watching a video clip was the most popular activity, followed by checking for information on music, leisure or entertainment, and then playing an online game.




Sunday, June 9, 2013

Zinio, Early Mover In Digital Magazines, Moves To The Netflix Model

Forbes reporting:
The so-called first mover advantage is really only an advantage if you don’t get too far out ahead of your customer. Founded in 2001, the digital magazines company Zinio was arguably a good eight years ahead of its time. After all, Apple AAPL +0.8% hadn’t yet come out with the iPhone, much less the iPad, the technology that would finally sell the average reader on the idea of a magazine consisting only of pixels.
To be sure, being early to the game has had its benefits. With 5,500 titles, Zinio has the deepest offerings of any digital newsstand, and its 12.5 million registered users rank it among the biggest vendors not named Apple, Amazon or Google GOOG +1.75%. But there’s also a bit of catching up to, with consumers increasingly demonstrating a preference for digital subscription plans that offer flexibility and variety rather than ownership, like the ones that have made Netflix NFLX +1.02% and Spotify into household names.
Zinio’s answer to that demand is a new offering called Z-Pass. For $5 a month, a customer receives her choice of three magazines from a catalog of more than 300. Subscribers can swap titles in and out as they choose and add more to the plan for $1.50 each, although some premium magazines, such as the Economist, cost more....
Zinio president Michelle Bottomley says Z-Pass grew out of a round of consumer research the company did last fall. “We asked them what they thought would make it easier to read more digital magazines,” she says. “One of the things we noticed is that price per unit was a big barrier.”
That $5 figure didn’t come out of nowhere. “We asked them if there was a price point they couldn’t resist,” says CEO Rusty Lewis. He likens the cost of $1.66 per issue to “the price of a cup of coffee.”
Five bucks also makes Zinio’s product a lot cheaper than the one offered by Next Issue Media, the digital magazine service owned by a consortium of big publishers, which sells subscription packages priced at $10 and $15 a month. While the $15 option includes unlimited access to all NIM’s titles, its library is far more limited, numbering 82 titles as of March.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/05/16/zinio-the-granddaddy-of-e-magazine-sellers-moves-to-the-netflix-model/

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Americans Show Signs of Leaving a News Outlet, Citing Less Information

PEW reporting:
Faced with shrinking revenue and dwindling audiences, news organizations in recent years have slashed staffs and reduced coverage. Most news consumers are little aware of the financial struggles that led to these cuts, a new Pew Research Center survey finds. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of them not only have noticed a difference in the quantity or quality of news, but have stopped reading, watching or listening to a news source because of it.
Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to, according to the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults in early 2013. And those most likely to have walked away are better educated, wealthier and older than those who did not—in other words, they are people who tend to be most prone to consume and pay for news.
1-Some Americans Are Abandoning News Outlets

http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/citing-reduced-quality-many-americans-abandon-news-outlets/

Newsweek By the Numbers

Journalism.org PEW reporting:
On Tuesday, May 28, Variety reported that IAC, Barry Diller's media and internet company, is considering selling Newsweek. It would be the magazine's second sale within a three-year period that included a merger with The Daily Beast and the decision to cease publishing a print edition. Editor-in-chief Tina Brown confirmed this in a memo on Wednesday, May 29. "Newsweek is a powerful brand," she wrote, "but its demands have taken attention away from The Daily Beast."
The news magazine genre in general has faced a difficult time transitioning to the digital space. But for Newsweek, the past few years have been especially tumultuous. Between 2007 and the end of 2009, when the magazine was still owned by the Washington Post Co., Newsweek reduced its total staff by 33%, according to Pew Research analysis of the magazines' staff boxes. Its revenues plummeted 38% in that three-year period, according to internal Newsweek documents. With these revenue declines, the magazine had an overall loss of $6 million in 2007 (before pension credits), which ballooned to $56 million in 2009. In August 2010, Newsweek was sold to audio industry businessman Sidney Harman for $1, plus the assumption of liabilities.
The losses continued after the sale. In 2010, Newsweek's internal documents projected a $22 million dollar overall loss for that year, less than half of what it had been the previous year. The next year, 2011, with the merger completed, IAC reported losses of nearly $14 million in its media group, which included Newsweek, The Daily Beast and several other websites.[1]
...
The more niche oriented news magazines fared far better in the last decade, though their overall print audience has been smaller than both Time and Newsweek. The Atlantic and The Week grew the most, with the Atlantic enjoying a 4.7% rise in total circulation to 485,300 copies sold and The Week growing 4.4% to 551,658 copies. (For more read the State of the News Media 2013: News Magazines' Overall Circulation)
Though single-copy sales make up only a small portion of news magazines' overall circulation (just 3%, in Newsweek's case), this indicator is considered a more objective measure than subscriptions of a publication's health. Here, Newsweek's biggest plunge occurred from 2008 to 2010, falling 55%. Its single-copy sales fell just 5% in 2012, while other news magazines saw their single-copy sales plummet, including 27% at Time, 17% at The Economist and 18% at The Week. Newsweek's smaller decline, though, is quickly put in perspective. The magazine sold 57% fewer copies in 2012 than in 2007. (For more read the State of the News Media 2013: News Magazines' Single-Copy Sales)
http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/newsweek_numbers
 

Nesta Research: Public Interest High, Advertiser Interest Low for Hyperlocal Media

LSE and Nesta reporting:
The future of local media in the UK has been in the limelight recently with the granting of local TV licenses, the House of Lords inquiry into media pluralism and the Newspaper Society supporting PresBoF’s Royal Charter bid, but what about the hyperlocal? In this post Jon Kinsbury of the innovation charity Nesta presents recent research on public demand for hyperlocal media and the potential for advertising in hyperlocal markets.  
When we began our programme Destination Local – designed to understand and to stimulate activity in the UK’s nascent hyperlocal media industry – there was a lot of assertion and very little hard evidence about its potential.
In March, we published Kantar Media’s research into the scale and nature of demand for hyperlocal services. This showed that they are popular and that consumption is being driven by the take-up of smartphones and tablets.
And last week, we published the first research on the size of the UK’s hyperlocal advertising market, produced by Oliver and Ohlbaum.
Understanding the potential for advertising is crucial. For any hyperlocal service to sustain itself beyond being a socially-important, amateur pursuit it must cover its costs and advertising has been the traditional way of raising revenue in order to do this. At the other end of the spectrum, traditional local media players – perhaps TV companies or local newspapers – trying to respond to audiences going online, will want to know how big an advertising market they are competing for.
The research we have published does not provide heartening reading for hyperlocal media services. First of all, it suggests that big brands will place their ads on location-based platforms rather than spend money with geographically-specific services. Facebook and Google are much more likely to collect advertising spend by providing content relevant to your location than, say, a blog about Birmingham.
Secondly, the research asked small, local businesses from around the UK if they spend their advertising budgets with local hyperlocal publishers. Some do, but out of a total advertising spend of nearly a billion pounds, little more than a few tens of millions go the way of hyperlocals. And this, the report forecasts, is unlikely to increase significantly anytime soon...
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2013/05/31/nesta-research-public-interest-high-advertiser-interest-low-for-hyperlocal-media/

Monday, June 3, 2013

Where's the growth gone? UK newspaper audience remains static despite online gains

theMediaBriefing reporting:

Harsh truth for UK newspapers - there simply aren't anymore UK readers to pick up.

That's the picture painted by the latest NRS stats, which show that the total number of readers attracted by newspapers online and off is either static or declining slightly.

There's still the move from print to online, but as you can see from our analysis more readers of quality newspapers have made the jump than those who read popular newspapers such as the Sun.

This basically leaves publishers with two options - make more from your UK audience especially those moving across to the web, or look overseas for growth. 

http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others

see full data at

http://www.nrs.co.uk/nrs-data-tables/
theThe explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:

And the problem isn't just one of age. Looking at weekly readership, the decline is happening among both over and under 35s.
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:

And the problem isn't just one of age. Looking at weekly readership, the decline is happening among both over and under 35s.
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:

And the problem isn't just one of age. Looking at weekly readership, the decline is happening among both over and under 35s.
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf
The explosion of online reading has given newspapers a new lease of life and global, instant reach. But new figures show that total UK newspaper brand readership is not growing and is even facing a small decline.
According to the latest NRD PADD figures, newspaper brands attracted fewer readers from the UK on daily, weekly and monthly measures in March 2013 than they did just six months earlier.
The total number of readers attaracted at least once a month across print and online was down from 74.5 million to 73.5 million between November 2012 and March 2013 (that figures includes readers of multiple brands).
But the overall trend is clear: the growth the news industry has enjoyed from digital has offset print declines but we right now we may be looking at an audience plateau:

And the problem isn't just one of age. Looking at weekly readership, the decline is happening among both over and under 35s.
- See more at: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/weekly-newspaper-reading-is-in-decline-but-some-are-more-reliant-on-print-than-others#sthash.BgQdz8nT.dpuf