Will the tablet save the press?
Posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2015 by ATC in Industry News with No Comments
© Chengyin Liu, Flickr “Ipad with magazines”
In a recent book entitled ‘La presse sur tablette*’ (Press on the Tablet), French journalists Cyril Petit and Vincent Mas do a brilliant job of analysing the efforts made by the media industry to adapt to this new medium. Their study reveals a whole host of counterintuitive facts.
And most striking amongst these… The tablet is not in fact a ‘mobile reading’ device insofar as readers mostly use it at home: 85.6% of use takes place at home. Their favourite place to read? In bed! In March 2014, at the launch of its Lumia 1020 tablet, Nokia went as far as to proudly announce ‘Excel in bed!’
In public transport, for example the bus or the metro, those who like to read the press on their mobile much prefer their smartphone to their tablet, which they are careful to leave at home. The only means of transport where it is used intensively are planes and trains, but there case users download their favourite content before starting their journey. While they are travelling, the tablet is no longer connected to the internet and consequently is no longer, in a sense, ‘mobile’.
The second lesson to be learnt from this essay has to do with time: tablets are used either early in the morning, or in the evening, when people have the time and leisure to concentrate on their reading. The ideal time slot? From 7 pm to 10 pm, with the favourite slot bang on 9 pm. The smartphone, however, is used all day long, in between two jobs at work or two stops on the metro.
These different times and places when people choose to read mean that content differs greatly between the two media: people read short news items, alerts, non-stop news on their smartphones, whereas they read specialist articles, ‘large-format’ content and watch videos on their tablets.
Another finding from the study: the tablet is the ideal device for making payments. While information on the internet is frequently free of charge, the very nature of the media consumed on tablets means that users are prepared to pay for it. According to a study by the QualiQuanti Institute in 2013, 77.5% of people who read the press on their tablets already spend more than EUR 8 per month on magazines and journals on this device.
This is good news for the digital press, especially as tablets continue to make inroads into the market. After worldwide sales of 195.4 million of these devices in 2013, sales of 321 million, according to Gartner Research, are forecast for 2015. While tablets will not themselves be enough to save the press, they can make a significant contribution.
*La presse sur tablette, published by CFPJ, EUR 28.5, 242 pages.
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