TWO-THIRDS OF TABLET USERS HAVE A NEWS APP
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
53% of tablet owners get news on their device every day.
42% read in-depth articles on tablet.
33% turn to new news sources on tablet.
30% spend more time getting news than before owning tablet.
THOUGHT: One of my favorite iPad apps is Flipboard, the social news reader. The thing aggregates the links that my friends and those I follow on Facebook and Twitter as well as my Google Reader feeds and formats them into a pleasant magazine-like format that I can flip through just like said old school medium.
There are others, including Zite and Pulse, an RSS reader. And now Google has introduced their own reader app for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices called Google Currents. The common denominator amongst them all is the flip behavior to turn “pages,” giving them all a magazine/newspaperish feel.
Google’s entry into the market is significant not necessarily because of the app itself but for what it says about Google’s view of the advertising potential of tablets.
For all Google does, they are, after all, an advertising company.
We’ve seen traditional print media leap onto the tablet app bandwagon but with an eye toward putting the paid subscription genie model back in the bottle.
It seems to me their future lies more in interactive advertising dollars than it does trying to get people to pay for something they’ve been getting for free since about 1995.
A convergence of technologies and data make this particular platform a potentially potent advertising vehicle, in the new school sense of advertising, not the old school, intteruptive model.
If you couple your news delivery app with plenty of social features, you’ve got the ability and analytics to deliver the kind of on-demand advertising you see in search and the precisely-targeted psychographic advertising you see in Facebook.
Couple that with the location data you get from the device and the rich interactive experience you can deliver, and tablet apps for newspapers and magazines may very well prove to be the savior of those industries.
Or they could screw it up.
FOLLOW FRIDAY: Blue Plate Restaurants (client) Edina Grill, Highland Grill, 3 Squares Restaurant, Longfellow Grill, Groveland Tap, Scusi and The Lowry.
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