News publications and other content producers have been doing all they can to create engaging native apps or responsive websites to capture the mobile-reader crowd. (In fact, USA TODAY likes to have its app available in new app stores and on new OS versions within a week of launch, and they expect all their apps to earn 4.5 star ratings or higher!) And while that’s definitely a good approach to take, new stats from Parse.ly suggest that a content site’s bread and butter is still the desktop and laptop screen.
Released a part of its bi-monthly Authority Report series, this month’s report took a look at how, when and where consumers are reading on an electronic device. Computer screens are winning by far. From Gigaom:
The company analyzed the screen sizes of devices that its customers’ readers use to access their content, and found that about 60 percent of all traffic came from devices with screen ratios of 16:9 or 16:10, indicating it came mostly from laptops or desktops. Overall, traffic from mobile devices accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of traffic, peaking at nearly 20 percent in the evenings and with most of it — at least 13.8 percent — coming from Apple iPads or iPhones.
At its highest (in the evening), mobile reading accounts for only 20% of traffic. However, while desktop/laptop traffic is very wave-like (it peaks mid-day and falls off noticeably around 5 pm), mobile use seems to be fairly consistent.
Testing a news or media app isn’t easy precisely because you need to support all these different device resolutions. You can’t ignore the desktop users because that’s the majority of your traffic, but if you fail to optimize your content for mobile (either through a successful native app or with a responsive web design) you’ll be losing consistent users. The most successful media companies will figure out how to be where ever their readers are, whenever their readers want them.