Pew: the ‘mobile majority’ has arrived

Pew: the ‘mobile majority’ has arrived

The comprehensive Pew study examines the landscape of American journalism.

As if publishers needed more confirmation that the future is mobile, new figures from Pew show that more readers are coming from mobile devices than computers for 39 of the top 50 digital news sites. On Wednesday, Pew released its “State of the News Media 2015” study, a comprehensive report that examines the landscape of journalism in the United States.

“Americans’ changing news habits have a tremendous impact on how and to what extent our country functions within an informed society,” said Pew’s Amy Mitchell. “So too does the state of the organizations producing the news and making it available to citizens day in and day out.”

The study found that growth in mobile ad spending also outpaced ad spending in all other platforms, which helps explain the what seems like the exponential growth of targeted ads. According to the study, mobile ad spending rose 78 percent, and now accounts for 37 percent of all digital ad spending.

But it is not all bad news for desktop computers. Pew found that for half of the top 50 news sites, visitors from desktops actually actually stayed on the site longer than mobile visitors.

Local and Network news television also will find some reason for optimism in the report.  Local TV continued to capture broadcast viewers throughout the past year. It saw slight increases in the viewership for evening (3 percent) and morning (2 percent) newscasts and even larger bumps for early morning and midday in 2014.

Network television news, meanwhile, saw a second straight year of audience growth, with a 5 percent increase in evening and a 2 percent increase in morning viewership. Network television had  a combined average evening viewership of roughly 24 million.

Of little surprise to anyone, cable news and newspapers were the big losers last year, the study found. Cable news saw its prime-time median viewership fall 8 percent across the three channels – Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.

And both daily and Sunday circulation for newspapers fell 3 percent in 2014, across papers of all sizes. The newspaper industry has seen its weekday circulation drop 19 percent since 2004.

 

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