The online news audience is enormous. The top 25 news sites in the U.S. recorded 342 million average unique monthly visitors in 2011 – up 17% over the prior year, according to Nielson Online. Four in ten Americans reported getting “most of their national and international news” from the Internet, according to a December 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Less than two in ten respondents said the same for newspapers. Six in ten Americans reported getting most national and international news from television, but that figure is rapidly changing. Among those 'online' and especially younger adults, web-only sources, such as search engines are growing. Of those online, 80% said the “the internet is the first or second most important source for 15 of the 16 local topics examined.”
All this will only increase with the growth in mobile. Apple alone reported it sold almost 25 million iPads worldwide in 2011. Many news consumers now own multiple devices. More than 75% of U.S. adults own a laptop or desktop computer. On top of that, 45% now own a smartphone, and tablet ownership nearly doubled at the end of the year, to almost 20%. And 13% own all three. This rapid growth is expected to continue.
A critical issue is how these mobile devices will impact digital news consumption... to what extent are Americans now getting their news on -the-go? News is a substantial part of the mobile experience. Some 50+% of smartphone owners use the device to get news, as do 56% of tablet owners. Those tablet figures are reinforced by other data... some 53% of tablet owners reported getting news daily on their tablets.
Consumers appear to be using different devices for news at different times of the day. During the early morning on weekdays, data show news sites receive similar spikes in traffic from smartphones, tablets and computers, as consumers turn to all three to check on the headlines. Later in the day, traffic is higher on computers, as people log in from the office. Between 9 p.m. and midnight, tablets see a more significant spike, “which suggests that people probably favor tablet usage as they retire to the couch or bed at the end of the day.”
More important, all data reinforce another idea... mobile is adding to news consumption. Those getting news on mobile devices also get it in other ways. Now they are just doing more of it. None of this means viewing news through a desktop or laptop is going away. Traditional computing still accounts for 93% of internet traffic. Instead, there is a potential boon here for news... consumers are turning to their devices to supplement the rest of their digital diet, rather than replace it.
Then add the growth of social media to the mix.
The extent to which news consumers rely on social media is rapidly evolving. Almost 10% of traffic to news sites now comes from Facebook, Twitter and smaller social media sites... a 57% percent increase since 2009. The percentage coming from search engines, meanwhile, is declining. It now accounts for roughly 21% of news site traffic, a drop of 9% since 2009. Social media, in other words, now bring in almost half as much traffic to news sites as search does.
“No social media connection... no news organization”... 100 major news organizations have named social media editors. In many cases, those jobs are now held by more senior staff than in the past.
Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. Facebook users spent 423 minutes (or 7 hours) on the site in December, 2011. Of the top 25 news sites, by contrast, CNN had the highest average time per user.. it was just 30 minutes per month.
Facebook has introduced the “subscribe” button. Much like Twitter, it allows users to “subscribe” to a feed of stories from any website or Facebook page. Twitter is also growing rapidly. The company's most recent estimates of U.S. Twitter users has Twitter at 24 million active users, a 32% increase over 2010. Though far smaller than Facebook, the predominance of journalists and news organizations among its adherents has given Twitter outsized influence in the media world. It has also taken on a critical role in disseminating breaking news. “Twitter is the new news-wire.”
Many media companies have become cognizant over the last year of the need to have a comprehensive, newsroom-wide social media strategy. News organizations now find themselves both partnering with and competing against large technology-based organizations far better financed and boast greater engineering knowledge. Facebook and Google, indeed, are driving many of the changes that have caused the advertising market for traditional media players to implode.
Meanwhile, the same pair, along with Apple, Amazon and others, increasingly control the platforms (both hardware and software) news organizations must use to reach their audience. The five large tech companies continue to tighten their hold on the digital market. Together they garnered 68% of online ad revenue in 2011, up from 63% in 2009, with the lion’s share going to Google and Facebook.
Lots of questions. And many more, make the move into mobile news a complicated one. But news organizations that want to survive, never mind thrive, in the rapidly evolving news ecosystem have little choice but to tackle them head-on.
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