6-Month-Old Babies Are Now Using Tablets and Smartphones

TIME reporting:

Given the ubiquity of electronics, it’s not so surprising that children come across media and devices in the home. Still, the researchers note that the children in this study were often very young and that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) frowns upon television and other media exposure for kids under the age of 2. The AAP saysexcessive media use can contribute to school trouble, attention problems and obesity, according to studies, and that Internet and cell-phone use can be platforms for risky behavior.

The survey results also suggest that parents let their children use media or mobile tech as distraction. For instance, the study showed 73% of surveyed parents let their kids play with mobile devices while they were doing chores around the house. Sixty percent said they let children use them while running errands, 65% to calm their child and 29% to put their kid to sleep. Just 30% of the parents in the survey said they spoke to their pediatrician about media use.http://time.com/3834978/babies-use-devices/

Magazine Audience Wants Quick Content Access

emarketer reporting:

The US magazine audience grew 9.3% between December 2013 and December 2014, from 1.43 billion to 1.59 billion, according to MPA – The Association of Magazine Media. And the research revealed a shift in magazine content consumption habits last year—one not just away from print. The traditional print and digital edition magazine audience—digital meaning an electronic reproduction of the magazine, such as an app version that looks just like the magazine but in electronic format—saw a big drop in share, from 70% to 63%...

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Instead, the magazine audience wants easier, faster access to content that doesn’t require flipping through pages, whether print or digital. Video and mobile web visitors—those viewing the website on a mobile device using a browser, not an electronic reproduction—were the huge drivers of magazine audience growth, with respective increases of 41.8% and 76.8%.

- See more at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Magazine-Audience-Wants-Quick-Content-Access/1012050/1?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=23f1e9f090-Need_to_Know_February_17_20152_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-23f1e9f090-31701933#sthash.WSNL2BZt.dpuf

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Magazine-Audience-Wants-Quick-Content-Access/1012050/1?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=23f1e9f090-Need_to_Know_February_17_20152_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-23f1e9f090-31701933

How newspapers lost the Millennials

Newsosaur reporting:
The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.” 

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox. 

To delve into the demographic disparity, I pulled the audience data on Mic.Com, which comScore calls the favorite news destination for individuals from the ages of 18 to 34. Although many publishers and editors never may have heard of Mic, comScore says it is visited by a thumping 60% of Millenials. 
,,,In a recent study, researchers at the University of Missouri reported that only 29% of newspaper publishers conducted focus groups prior to putting paywalls around the digital products that most profess to be the future of their franchises.  

Instead of talking with their intended consumers, fully 85% of respondents to the survey said they asked other publishers what they thought about erecting barriers around the content that they had been freely providing for the better part of two decades.  

While paywalls boosted revenues at most newspapers because they were accompanied by stiff increases in print subscription rates, the tactic gave the growing population of digital natives – and non-readers of every other age – the best reason yet for not engaging with newspapers. 

Of course, newspapers were losing Millenials well before they started feverishly erecting paywalls in the last few years. But what if publishers and editors had begun studying the needs and attitudes of the emerging generation from the early days of the Millenium? Could the outcomes have been more positive?  

http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/12/how-newspapers-lost-millenials.html?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=aadbc83941-Need_to_Know_December_12_201412_12_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-aadbc83941-31701933

Changes in social media usage

ofcom reporting:

Not all aspects of the internet are retaining their appeal for the UK. The proportion of online adults in this country accessing social networks each week fell from 65% in September 2013 to 56% in October 2014. This was the steepest fall of any of the countries surveyed.

One factor behind the decline may be the rise of other social media which do not involve networks of connections, such as online video sites and instant messaging.

Social network use also fell in the USA, Japan and China. However, it is still increasing in some other countries - including Italy, which is now the leading country for social networking, with three quarters of Italians using such sites at least once a week.

Weekly access to social networks

Despite their decline in the UK, social networks remain the most popular internet activity for smartphone users. Among all those who access the internet on their phone in the UK, 64% use social networks, ahead of the next most popular activity of reading online news (44%).

http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2014/icmr-2014/

Content is King, But Viewing Habits Vary by Demographic

Nielsen reporting:
All Americans spent a little more than 141 hours a month connecting with traditional television in third-quarter 2014. During the same period, the overall population also saw over an hour increase in time spent watching time-shifted content and a four-hour increase watching video on the Internet.
But not all consumers are watching the same way. Among the different race/ethnicities featured in the report, content consumption varies widely.
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/content-is-king-but-viewing-habits-vary-by-demographic.html

Digital News Report: Journalists Still Matter

Reuters Institute reporting:

The third annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that as the online news environment grows ever more crowded, journalists play an important role in driving traffic to news brands and in encouraging people to pay for them.

The digital age has brought about a shift towards journalists as a key reason for using or trusting particular online sources of news.

The reputation of individual writers is cited as one of the key reasons why people might be prepared to pay for online news.

Following a year in which Glenn Greenwald emerged from relative obscurity to become a star name after his work with the fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2014 suggests he is part of a wider trend.

The report is based on a survey conducted in US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil and Japan. Total sample size was 18859 adults with around 2000 per country. Fieldwork was undertaken at the end of January/start of February 2014. The survey was carried out online. The data was weighted to targets set on age and gender, region, newspaper readership and social grade to reflect the total population.

In a number of countries, notably France, Spain and the US, the role of the journalist is now considered almost as important in driving trust as the role of the news brand itself.

As report author Nic Newman says: “This is particularly true where traditional titles are weaker, or face challenge from online-only news sites, many of which are increasingly built around the personality and skills of a columnist or reporter”...

...Young people, the readers and viewers of tomorrow, are turning increasingly to mobile devices as their preferred way of receiving news and consequently “snacking” more in terms of both the time spent on sites and the type of content they consume.

Across all 10 countries surveyed, over a third (36percent) of 18-24s say the smartphone is now their primary access point for digital news. The report reveals that young people in particular (18-35) increasingly rely on social sources like Facebook and Twitter to discover news stories. It also highlights the rise of WhatsApp as a significant new network for sharing and discussing the news particularly in Spain, Italy and our sample in urban Brazil.

http://en.ejo.ch/8932/digital_news/digital-news-report-journalists-still-matter

Why social is key to creating habit-forming news products

medium reporting:

Social media editors such as myself may often be judged on the traffic they drive to a news site rather than on reader engagement.

Here is a theory for demonstrating the importance of social engagement and how community is key to triggering a habit that will make readers return frequently and, for news sites with a pay model, encourage subscriber sign ups and retention. Much of this post has been influenced by a talk by Nir Eyal (thanks toKristine Lowe for blogging about it).

Why do people form habits around products?According to Nir Eyal, it’s often fear that encourages a person to return to a product again and again. Boredom drives return visits to YouTube,loneliness encourages people to go to Facebook, uncertainty encourages people to search Google, he says. So for newspapers, news sites and digital products, perhaps the driver isFOMO, a fear of missing out. People return to find out about the key news events that they don’t want to miss.

Rewarding readers Eyal tells us that habit-forming technology uses one or more of the rewards of ‘tribe’, ‘hunt’, and ‘self’. (I know they are off-putting terms, but stick with me on this.)...

Poynter reporting:
Long-time critics of imprecise unique visitor and page view metrics like me have had reason to cheer in recent months.
Both the Financial Times and Economist have started to offer advertisers the alternative of rates based on time spent rather than raw traffic numbers.
Chartbeat corrected a major flaw in existing measures of time spent, then got its system “accredited” by the influential Media Ratings Council. And Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has been an effective evangelist in interviews and speeches for a more sophisticated way of looking at the attention of digital audiences.
That’s real progress. But plowing through dozens of articles and interviewing a few key sources, I have concluded that it is way early to declare victory and a new day dawning in digital measurement.
Oddly, although we like to think of the digital world as fast-moving and progressive, there is an established status quo for counting digital audiences backed by powerful vested interests who remain mostly happy with the unholy triad of uniques, page views and clickthroughs.
Start with the digital big guys — Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL...

The politics of reforming digital audience metrics — don’t underestimate the status quo

Political Polarization & Media Habits

Pew reporting:
When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals, according to a new Pew Research Center study.
The project – part of a year-long effort to shed light on political polarization in America – looks at the ways people get information about government and politics in three different settings: the news media, social media and the way people talk about politics with friends and family. In all three areas, the study finds that those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views – and very distinct from each other....

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/

Infiltrating people’s habits: How Time works to engage readers

NiemanLab reporting:
It was a Thursday in late August and the Internet was whipping itself into a frenzy. The cable channel FXX was about to kick off its Every Simpsons Ever marathon, showing all 522 Simpsons episodes back-to-back-to-back. And in its daily meeting that morning, Time’s audience engagement team was figuring out how to best take advantage of the moment and convert interest in the Simpsons into visits to Time’s website.
Time, together with sister site Money, published at least five different pieces on the Simpsons marathon on that day alone.
...
Time’s editors meet every morning at 9:45 to discuss stories for the upcoming day. After that meeting, Schweitzer, Ross, and Borchers gather to discuss the 15 or so stories they plan on promoting heavily and how they’ll use what Time calls its “external levers of distribution” — which range from its daily email newsletter and cross-promotions on other Time Inc. websites to working with the Time Inc. PR department and, of course, social media — to ensure that their stories are widely read and shared.
Of the three, Schweitzer is the longest tenured Time employee, having joined the company all the way back in August 2013, and their roles are emblematic of Time’s revamped digital strategy. Time had about 50 million unique visitors in both August and September, more than doubling the roughly 20 million it attracted the year before.
Their efforts go beyond social as well. The Ebola story discussed that morning, covering how some people are surviving the virus, was the top story in Time’s daily email the next morning. Called The Brief after the central feature of Time’s homepage, the email lists 12 things readers need to know each day, and it has an average open rate of around 40 percent.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/infiltrating-peoples-habits-how-time-works-to-engage-readers/

Journalism’s biggest competitors are things that don’t even look like journalism

gigaom reporting:
....
What the web is doing to journalism, Debrouwere argues, is taking the things it used to consider its bread and butter and making them fungible in ways they never were before. That hasn’t just changed the business model for news or media companies, it has changed the expectations of their audience in some fundamental ways, ways that go beyond whether someone reads a news story on the web or in print.

I’m not talking about digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze. Yes, journalism has evolved and is better for it. I’m talking beyond that. I’m not even talking about the fact that everyone is a potential publisher now… beyond even that. I think journalism is being replaced.

The examples are legion: as Debrouwere notes, many people used to find new music by reading reviews or coverage in a newspaper or magazine, and did the same thing for movies and TV shows — but now they get access to all the music and movies and TV shows they could want, and all the commentary surrounding them, via services like Spotify or Netflix, or websites like IMDB and Amazon. So what purpose does the local newspaper or newsmagazine serve?
...
This is an important point: if you’re a media company, your competition isn’t the product or service that is better than you — and it’s certainly not the one that you think is doing journalism — it’s the one that is good enough for your readers or users. In other words, if it provides a service or information that is useful or valuable to them, that is all that matters, not whether it fits the objective definition of something called “journalism.”
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/10/journalism-biggest-competitors-are-things-that-dont-even-look-like-journalism/

4 tech innovations that are transforming marketing

digiday reporting:
...
Streaming
Netflix has about 38 million subscribers. HBO Go has about 32 million(Amazon won’t disclose its numbers). I have spent over 45 hours watching “Revenge” and never saw a commercial. I’ve streamed “True Blood,” “Game of Thrones,” “Bletchley Circle,” “Call The Midwife,” Sherlock,” “Vampire Diaries” and “Downton Abbey,” in total spending hundreds of hours watching those shows and never once saw a 30-second spot.
I still haven’t cut the cord. But cord cutters have grown 44 percent since last year, according to Experian Marketing Services. And as of a year ago, nearly 60 percent of millennials regularly stream content.
Social
Word-of-mouth has always been the most persuasive form of advertising. People trust what their friends say more than they trust a message from a brand. Today social media has amplified that effect.--
Mobile
Mobile advertising is still in its infancy and until creative and measurement improves, advertising dollars won’t flow to mobile. It’s an exciting time to be developing tech in mobile. But even though we look at our mobile phones 150 times each day, mobile doesn’t really work as an advertising channel. That’s really worrisome.

Programmatic
For a long time, we had to use content as a proxy for audience. Today, we can identify consumers using data, and we can use ad tech to buy access to the exact set of consumers we want to see our ads. We can also drive relevance by serving them very specific messages at very specific times when they’re at a key moment in their purchase journey.
...But there is one thing that gives me lots of hope: people love brands enormously.
People define themselves using brands. We love buying bags with logos, shoes with logos, jewelry with logos. We use brands to communicate what really matters to us — and I can’t imagine a time when we won’t. But how we discover brands has fundamentally changed. Interruption has given way to engagement, influence has changed and has shifted to people, and personalization is expected even by mass brands...


http://digiday.com/agencies/4-tech-innovations-transforming-marketing/

Digital Set to Surpass TV in Time Spent with Media in the UK

eMarketer reporting:

This year, for the first time ever, the amount of time UK consumers spend with digital media (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) will surpass the amount of time spent viewing television, according to eMarketer’s estimates of media consumption among UK adults. The growth of mobile is key to this shift, as it continues to drive both digital and overall growth of time spent with all media. In contrast, time spent on desktops and laptops is plateauing.
The average UK adult will spend more than 8.5 hours each day consuming media in 2014. Of that total, 3 hours and 41 minutes will be spent online, on nonvoice mobile activities or with other digital media, eMarketer estimates, compared with 3 hours and 15 minutes watching television.
The total reflects simultaneous media consumption—for example, if someone uses a mobile device for 1 hour while watching television, it counts as 1 hour for each activity. The estimates do not attempt to define “primary” focus during simultaneous usage. 
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Set-Surpass-TV-Time-Spent-with-Media-UK/1010686/2 

STUDY: iPad Readers Are Skimming And Can't Remember What They've Read

 French consulting firm Miratech just published a research report claiming that users reading news on an iPad are less focused than when reading a newspaper. They used eye-tracking techniques in order to study the way people read, as well as how long people spend looking at each part of a page.
Miratech concludes that "Readers are more likely to skim over articles on an iPad than in a newspaper."
Some bullet points from the research report:

• 20% of users have better retention when they read something on paper versus on an iPad

• There's no difference in the amount of time it takes a person to read an article on an iPad versus in a newspaper

• On average, eyes linger longer on paper, implying more focused reading (40 ms longer on print)

• People's "gaze patterns" when they first look at a page are identical on an iPad versus a print newspaper.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-users-reading-statistics-versus-newspapers-2011-5

Woman Power - New Data Provides Deeper Profile Of Typical E-Book ‘Power Buyer’

paidContent reporting:

Today’s e-book power buyer—someone who buys an e-book at least once a week—is a 44-year-old woman who loves romance and is spending more on buying books now than in the past. She uses a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle instead of reading on her computer.
In a panel this morning, the Book Industry Study Group announced these and other new stats from its Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey:

-E-books currently make up around 11 percent of the total book market. The percentage of print book consumers who say they download e-books more than doubled between October 2010 and January 2011—from 5 percent to almost 13 percent.
-Women make up 66 percent of e-book power buyers. In 2009, they didn’t even make up half of e-book customers (they were at 49 percent of the e-book market).
-Most e-books sold (58 percent) are fiction, with literary fiction, science fiction, and romance each comprising over 20 percent of all e-book purchases.
-“Power buyers” represent about 18 percent of the total people buying e-books today, but they buy 61 percent of all e-books purchased.
-The most influential factors leading to an e-book purchase are free samples and low prices.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-new-data-provides-deeper-profile-of-typical-e-book-power-buyer

Study: Tablet ownership will double by 2012; seen as alternative to TV

Zdnet reporting:
 Dubbed as “Digital Home 3—The Democratization of Technology,” which surveyed residents in 5,000 homes (4,000 U.S., 1,000 Canadian), here’s a snapshot of the highlights found in the study published by the USC Marshall Institute for Communication Technology Management:

Tablet ownership in North American households is projected to increase from 8 percent in 2011 to 27 percent in 2012. The biggest growth in tablet users will be among 13-44 year olds.

The profile of current tablet users is revealing: 70 percent are between the ages of 18 and 44. They are slightly more likely to be male than female, and they largely live in high-income households. Members of ethnic groups, including African Americans, Latinos and Asians, are nearly twice as likely to buy a tablet in the next year as Caucasians.

Tablet users consume twice as much media as the mainstream, and they increasingly want to control what they watch by using the device in the future as an alternative to traditional television.

Smartphone ownership will increase from 29 percent in 2011 to 40 percent in 2012.

The highest penetration of smartphones will be in the Latino and Asian markets.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/study-tablet-ownership-will-double-by-2012-seen-as-alternative-to-tv/49047?tag=nl.e019

The newsonomics of the missing link

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting/Ken Doctor:




Let’s go back to the time before Palm Pilots, at the dawn of consumer digital civilization itself, a time of AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve. Hunched heavily by the analog world on his shoulders, Pre-Tablet Man has slowly begun to raise his head, through successive innovations of laptops (!), pocket-sized cellphones, smartphones, smarter phones and early e-readers. Now, as we enter Year 2 of the iPad era, it seems like our digital man is almost standing up straight. The digital world has moved from geek chic to consumer commonplace. Our digital devices have become on/off appliances, no manual necessary.
 ...1. Reality: Print is in permanent decline.
That’s what 21 consecutive quarters of decline (year over year) in U.S. newspaper print ad revenue tells us (“The newsonomics of oblivion“). Consumer magazine revenue has moved barely positive, but is still substantially below pre-recession levels. Print is there to be milked, as long as it can, in the digital transition. Fewer newspapers are being sold, and they are thinner and thinner.
The tablet link: The tablet is a print-like replacement for newspapers and magazines. Publishers privately report (and an increasing spate of reports from Instapaper to RJI to Yudu) that tablet readers read the tablet much more like the newspaper than the way they read news websites. Longer session times. Longer stories. Early morning and evening reading. Pre-tablet, publishers had no potential replacement...

2. Reality: Online engagement is inadequate.

The tablet link: The tablet offers a way to re-engage readers, a corollary to the tablet’s replacement potential. The biggest problem for news publishers isn’t (a) that the digital ad world only produces pennies on the old ad dollar, (b) the low share of digital ad revenue they get, or (c) a changing cabal of digital startups from Yahoo to Google to Apple that are stealing their business. Their biggest problem is online engagement. News producers work in a world of massive cost, funding well-paid newsrooms and all the legacy supports from advertising to finance to circulation. That investment made a lot of sense when readers really engaged with their products. Consider that in the heyday, your average newspaper would command 270 minutes (4.5 hours) of attention per household per month. Consider that online, the average engagement time is five to 15 minutes per month.

 
Read more at:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/the-newsonomics-of-the-missing-link/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=bf96900a94-DAILY_EMAIL

Are iPad Users Shifting Their Reading Habits From Work PC To Sofa?

paidContent reporting:
iPad owners are shifting their online reading time out of work time and in to prime-time TV hours, according to fascinating analysis from ReadItLater, a web articles bookmarking service.
Although articles bookmarked by non-iPad owners are read fairly consistently throughout the day on computers, iPad owners largely limit their computer reading time to their lunchtime and instead read articles on iPad during the evening, the analysis shows.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-analysis-ipad-users-shifting-reading-habits-from-work-pc-to-sofa
“When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs,” says ReadItLater’s blog. “They shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption. It’s the iPad leading the jailbreak from consuming content in our desk chairs.”
iPad Users

 The graph of when users are reading on the iPad shows the biggest time for reading: personal prime time.
This is generally the most relaxing time of day. After a long day, work is done, dinner is resting in your belly and there is nothing left to do but put your feet up and relax. This time slot is the same one coveted by television. When the majority of people are consuming content it seems perfectly natural that people would use this time to do their reading as well.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-analysis-ipad-users-shifting-reading-habits-from-work-pc-to-sofa

Publications Seeing Impressive Tablet Engagement

paidContent reporting:

No wonder newspapers and magazines are so keen on iPad editions. Not only do apps give them a retail environment in which to charge - tablet users also spend a lot of time reading their publications...
Across the editions developed by TigerSpike - whose clients include Telegraph Media Group, The Economist, The Australian and Mail Online - average app engagement time is 30 to 34 minutes, the agency’s managing director Nic Newman tells me.
That’s far higher than for newspapers’ websites. “Page views is five times the average for the publications consumed on the web,” Newman added.
In the case of The Daily Telegraph‘s recently-released second iPad app, which requires daily payment or subscription, “a significant proportion” of dwell time is spent in the built-in crossword puzzle. For The Telegraph, it seems, the killer app is the utility in the app.
...
Previous research shows some tablet owners have shifted their reading of articles from the web and daytime to the evening and tablet.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-publications-seeing-impressive-tablet-engagement

Tablets Quickly Become Major Home Entertainment Device

Most owners are using their PCs less

Research on tablet usage has found, since the iPad first made its way into the hands of millions in 2010, that they are primarily used for entertainment, and the availability of media content on the devices is still driving purchase intent. A March 2011 survey from mobile ad network AdMob amplifies those findings further, showing that for many owners tablets are fast becoming a primary source of entertainment.
Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.
More than two in five respondents now spend more time each day with their tablet than with a traditional computer or with a smartphone, and a third use tablets more than they watch TV.

The No. 1 tablet activity, according to the survey, was playing games. Searching for information, emailing and reading the news rounded out the top four activities, suggesting that web surfing and keeping up with communications are important tablet activities that go beyond pure entertainment, without reaching very far into the realm of genuine productivity.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008350