Digital Omnivores

Digital Omnivores

Comscore recently released a study on the cross platform consumption of digital media and the habits of tablet/smartphone users against traditional computer usage. While only around 7% of internet traffic comes from non-computer platforms, this number is on the rise, especially within tablet browsing. During a typical weekday, when studying the consumption of news digitally, mobile phones are used consistently throughout the day while computer usage spikes during the working hours. Tablet usage dominates evening.

More than half of the US population use mobile media and this can largely be contributed to the rise in the adoption of smartphones. However, as mentioned earlier, tablet adoption and usage is rapidly increasing. At this stage, the iOS operating platform contributes more than half of all mobile internet usage, and within tablets alone, iPads count for a staggering 97% of all digital traffic amongst tablets. Much like “early” smart phones, this isn’t completely surprising as Apple’s well publicized ease of use and status as an ahead of the curve brand has cornered the early tablet market. We can expect the collection of similar tablets running Android OS among others will gain share and percentage of traffic as we move forward.

Of these tablet users, demographic similarities as well as user trends arose. The study found that well over half of all tablet users were male and a third of those users were between the ages of 25 and 34. Beyond that, nearly half of users had incomes of over $100K. The cost of the tablet itself as well as the cost of service and data plan clearly makes it a luxury item, often supplementary to a smartphone or computer, lending a logical aspect to the findings. Amongst users, the most common activities surrounded browsing and consumption of news as well as social media. Real time social media updates had particular prevalence amongst subjects in the study and the emergence of tablet-compatible...