Tablets dramatically changed reading habits lifting long content consumption

It just took a while for tablet users to change their read­ing habits since the intro­duc­tion on the mar­ket of the very first wide-adopted tablet, the iPad. Today, accord­ing to a research by Pew Research Cen­ter in col­lab­o­ra­tion with The Econ­o­mist Group, tablets make users search and browse for more qual­ity con­tent and read more long form sto­ries on their devices.

The research showed off inter­est­ing results that are worth con­sid­er­a­tion by Pub­lish­ers and Authors for their con­tent strat­egy on mobile devices. The main sta­tis­tics spot a huge 77% daily usage fre­quency for device own­ers, with an aver­age of 90 min­utes a day spent on tablets.

Other key gauges might be of inter­est for Pub­lish­ers or Indie Authors look­ing for real engage­ment and dis­cov­er­abil­ity of qual­ity and long form con­tent. The main ratios on that:

‹ 53% con­sume news daily

‹ 30% spend more time get­ting news than before own­ing a tablet

‹ 33% turn to new sources on their tablet

‹ 42% read in-depth arti­cles reg­u­larly on their tablets

Com­bin­ing eco­nom­ics infor­ma­tions on paid con­tent and sub­scrip­tion pur­chases from iPad users, sta­tis­tics are now fully sup­port­ing a pub­lish­ing strat­egy based on the deliv­ery of qual­ity con­tent fully for­mat­ted for mobile devices. The read­ing expe­ri­ence should be worth the time users spend using their devices for read­ing, and their will­ing­ness to pay for the good sources.

Dis­cov­er­abil­ity has been widely enhanced by the many con­tent stores avail­able, that despite the 30% com­mis­sion cut, offer a wide vari­ety of pro­mo­tion wid­gets, search fea­tures, user rec­om­men­da­tion and ana­lyt­ics capabilities.

The pub­lish­ing indus­try should seri­ously con­sider its multi-tiered media strat­egy with aggre­ga­tors lift­ing con­tent dis­cov­er­abil­ity and dri­ving rev­enues for pre­mium con­tent pur­chases by tar­get audi­ences, pitched by con­tent dis­trib­uted through the many news aggre­gat­ing Apps like Flip­board, Pulse, Google Cur­rent, Trapit and many to come.

It is fre­quently said that the App Econ­omy is liv­ing on niches, full of poten­tially engaged users will­ing to find seri­ous sat­is­fac­tion with ready to use dig­i­tal ware and good con­tent. Mix­ing up a work­ing App Econ­omy together with news pub­lish­ing strate­gies, many dig­i­tal edi­tions are grow­ing steadily fully pay­ing their bills. The New Yorker is one of the most suc­cess­ful long form con­tent pub­lisher in the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing arena, with many new exper­i­men­tal projects on their way to go.

Jour­nal­ism and its future prob­a­bly depend more on tablet devices adop­tion and seri­ous pub­lish­ing strate­gies for them than we might have been ready to think.

Get more insights on the inspir­ing inter­views of Alissa Quart (The Atavist), Jim Giles (Mat­ter) and Lucia Adams (The Times) avail­able as a pod­cast download

The full research data from the Pew Research Cen­ter is avail­able at Jour​nal​ism​.org and per­fectly visu­al­ized in the info graphic below.