After reviewing the five key takeaways from the State of the News Media report and a few pages from the full report, I noted a few audience problems.
First, as mentioned in the very first takeaway, while more digital news traffic is coming from the mobile-using audience, they are not spending as much time on the site as desktop users. This could create a problem if advertisers ask for more than just a headcount of who is visiting the site. What good is a 60,000/day visitor count if they bail after 20 seconds? Did they even see the advertisements on the page?
Next, I was fairly surprised at the low percentage of digital adoption of newspaper readership. I was certain that more print subscribers would at least utilize a portion of the web services but more than half still claim they only read the printed product. This can cause a problem if the paper is trying to push a digital package to its advertisers or trying to justify spending on staffing or technology for the digital desk.
Finally, something that jumped out to me was the podcast section of the report. The author says "NPR reports that downloads of their podcasts were up 41% in 2014." However, I want to know what that percentage would be without the immensely-popular Serial podcast (See http://www.wsj.com/articles/serial-podcast-catches-fire-1415921853). The audience problem I see with their statistic is how many of that 41% came on board solely for Serial and are now back to their non-podcast-listening lives? Or, what was the adoption rate thanks to the popularity of the podcast?
First, as mentioned in the very first takeaway, while more digital news traffic is coming from the mobile-using audience, they are not spending as much time on the site as desktop users. This could create a problem if advertisers ask for more than just a headcount of who is visiting the site. What good is a 60,000/day visitor count if they bail after 20 seconds? Did they even see the advertisements on the page?
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| http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/ |
Finally, something that jumped out to me was the podcast section of the report. The author says "NPR reports that downloads of their podcasts were up 41% in 2014." However, I want to know what that percentage would be without the immensely-popular Serial podcast (See http://www.wsj.com/articles/serial-podcast-catches-fire-1415921853). The audience problem I see with their statistic is how many of that 41% came on board solely for Serial and are now back to their non-podcast-listening lives? Or, what was the adoption rate thanks to the popularity of the podcast?
Visualization of the data in the table
ReplyDeletehttp://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/240669/even-as-digital-grows-more-than-half-of-reported-newspaper-audience-is-print-only/