mardi 13 décembre 2011

The phone and the newspaper. A question of time

.
According to eMarketer, Americans spend more time with their mobile (65 minutes) than with newspapers (26), magazines (18). OK, but:
  • What do people do when they use their mobile? They are on Facebook, they call, play videogames, read papers, text or mail, manage their agenda, take pictures, watch videos, and much more. Who knows?
  • What do people do when they read a paper? They just read it: even if they do crossword puzzles, they are still involved with a paper (Time Spent Reading). 
BizReport comments on the time spent with newspapers and magazines claiming that it is "the lowest engagement time for all media studied". Is this fair? What kind of engagement?
  • With how many media is a person engaged while reading a newspaper ? One.
  • With how many media is a person engaged while using a smartphone? Depends on the number of apps used: five, ten? (33 apps per smartphone in the U.S., according to Nielsen - "The Mobile Media Report", December 2011).
A smartphone is more than one media; it is a multiple media. In order to keep that specificity in mind when reading comparative stats, should we call it a "multiphone" or polyphone (or something better)?
For an advertiser, time spent remains a sensitive and fragile factor when it comes to comparing media.
.n

2 commentaires:

Chrystelle NAMMOUR a dit…

Je ne comprends par trop pourquoi le smartphone est ici considéré comme un media. C'est un media dans le sens de « portail » vers une multitude de choses dont la TV, la radio, les journaux... Ce qu’il faudrait comparer c’est le temps moyen de lecture d’un journal papier face au temps moyen passé à lire des news depuis un terminal type Smartphone.

Bastien Crochet a dit…

I would like to remind you that a media is a means of broadcasting large and collective information or opinions, whatever the support may be. It enables to communicate to a very large number of people without letting the possibility to personalize the message. That is why the smartphone is naturally a media, and even a “super media” insofar as it has got all the existing medias in one small device: press, radio, television, and of course the Internet.
Once this is said, I find it odds to compare the phone and the newspaper. The phone and the newspaper are more and more only one. People stop buying newspapers for several reasons: they replace them by their smartphone, they don’t want to pay for something that can be free on the Internet (and the smartphone), or they don’t have time anymore to read them. And the new habit is to download the app from the newspapers companies (ex: New York Times), which brings the advantages to often be free, to be updated dozen of times per day, and to be a lot more ergonomic, for example in the metro.
Anyway, I think it would be more instructive to compare time spent reading on a real newspaper and time spent reading a newspaper on a mobile app.