Survey: Most tablet owners read news on device after 5 p.m. so should publishers change when they publish content?
If you have a tablet, most likely you access it after a full day of work, according to a new survey. In light of these results, news media companies might be wise to publish content in the evening in order to capture that news-reading demographic.
Around half of mobile tablet users who consume news tended to use their technologies after 5 p.m., a survey from the Reynolds Journalism Institute found. Also, three-quarters of large media tablet owners said they used it for news most frequently at home, the report adds.
“About 60 percent of owners who favored large media tablets consider their experience consuming news on their tablets better than reading a printed newspaper,” the report notes.
Don’t count out print, though: “More than half of the mobile media owners who favored a large media tablet for consuming news subscribed to a printed newspaper and/or news magazine.”
What’s interesting to note, though, is the tablet use at 5 p.m. Why shouldn’t news outlets recognize this stat as a valuable tip towards tweaking their publishing strategy? A savvy publisher would push out more tablet-friendly content when the work day is done, mirroring those nightly newspapers of yesteryear. Multimedia-rich content could be the focus, since the tablet experience varies quite wildly from the desktop experience.
In the 24-hour news cycle we now call the norm, being on top of a news consumer’s schedule is integral to finding the right content for the right eyeballs. It would be foolish for publishers to ignore surveys pointing to the key moment when readers are online; otherwise, they’ll regress to their 2002 days of ignoring what mobile and Web users want.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user stevegarfield