December 06, 2011
NAA: Mobile traffic to news venues up 65% since last year
According to the Newspaper Association of America, mobile pageviews for news websites and apps are up 65% compared to a year ago…
“Many newspapers reported triple-digit page view increases to their mobile sites and apps,” said the NAA announcement. “NAA’s analysis is based on traffic figures for more than 20 newspaper media companies—large and small, public and private—that supplied year-over-year internal measurements of mobile page view traffic and unique visitors from September 2010 and September 2011. Unique visitor count increases ranged as high as 200%, with an average increase of about 70% for the publishers reporting.”
The trouble with measuring the growth of mobile news audiences is that—especially for mobile apps, but sometimes also for dynamic or HTML5 mobile websites—the concept of a “pageview” can be rather nebulous and thus complex to gauge.
Also, this study did not take into account mobile traffic or engagement that happens via the social media presences maintained by news organizations.
Randy Bennett, NAA’s senior VP for business development, acknowledged that in this research NAA asked only for total metrics across websites and apps. “We understand that there are some inconsistencies in how news organizations report that data,” he said. “We didn’t attempt to track or separate out apps vs. sites.”
While this research did not uniformly gather data to compare mobile traffic to overall traffic, Bennett noted: “Anecdotally, some news organizations reported that 7-12% of traffic is now coming from mobile.”
NAA will be discussing mobile news traffic and trends in more detail in its upcoming benchmarking study, which is due out in early 2012. “We’ll have data from individual newspapers to get more detail one usage for different mobile device types and platforms,” said Bennett.
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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Tags: research, mobile, newspapers, statistics, traffic
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