Could it be that the mighty tablet is here to save the day for news publications? Well, yes, if this latest report is anything to go by.
As newspapers and magazines rush to app-ify themselves for the world’s tech-heads, it transpires that there’s very good reason for doing so, as reported today by PaidContent:UK.
It seems that tablet users spend rather a lot of time consuming news on their devices – up to five times more than the time spent on publications’ websites.
TigerSpike develops mobile apps for the likes of Telegraph Media Group, The Economist and The Australian and Mail Online, where it says that the average app engagement time is 30-40 minutes per visit.
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This is good news for tablets, which many people feared initially would struggle to find a niche in the market. But with smartphones too small to properly read on, and laptops typically too cumbersome to carry everywhere, it seems tablets are definitely finding their feet in a pretty crowded technological marketplace.
Following on from last week’s report on how some newspapers were performing in the digital usability league, it seems that apps are very much the future for news vendors, but mobile devices also affect when and how we consume the news, as we reported earlier this year. So publications need to invest the resources in developing user-friendly platforms and understand how users like to engage with it. Cutting corners to cut costs is a false economy in the long run.
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