There was some good news from the USA on a potential ray of hope for the newspaper and magazine business. The research was conducted but the measurement company ComScore and it looked at the readership of newspapers by tablet owners.
It found thet just over one in ten tablet owners read a newspaper on their device on a daily basis rising to over one in three who view newspapers on their devices on a monthly basis. They also estimate that tablets account for 7% of all traffic to newspaper sites, which, given the relative ‘youth’ of the device is a very strong figure.
ComScore define a tablet as a “touchscreen tablet device with a slate form factor, a 7 inch or greater screen size and a data connection, but no voice plan”.
To try and translate that into some meaningful data relevant to the Irish Market we have to look at data from a range of sources and extrapolate from there.
Ireland’s ComReg estimate the number of smartphone and tablet devices in Ireland to be 2,202,930. Theses are the number of devices that are active 3G users and it equates to 44% of all mobile devices.
Google has conducted extensive research on mobile devices in Ireland and they estimate smartphone penetration to be 43% here. Unfortunately it doesn’t break this down further into tablet/non-tablet. Red C Research estimates that the share on Tablet devices will be 41% by the end of 2012. So, you could extrapolate that, by the end of 2012 there will be just shy of 1,000,000 tablet devices in Ireland.
That’s has to be some “brain food” for the Print Industry as the tablet is certainly a format that a newspaper or magazine can readily adapt to.
| Read newspapers on Tablets | Total | iPad | Android | Kindle | NOOK |
| Almost every day | 11.50% | 12.00% | 12.10% | 12.80% | 13.40% |
| At least once each week | 11.00% | 12.20% | 10.10% | 12.30% | 8.30% |
| Once to three times a month | 14.60% | 14.20% | 14.60% | 14.10% | 10.10% |
| Ever in month | 37.10% | 38.30% | 36.80% | 39.20% | 31.80% |
