Potential in Digital Magazine Publishing Engagement

Tablets are leading to interesting digital magazine publishing engagement from users

Digital publishers have been looking for clear indications on how audience members are using tablets to interact with their content.

With the same hopes, I looked at a few of our own stats in addition to looking at the information shared by other reputable sources around the Internet.

My internal search was fairly simplistic, but the information was quite telling. The iPad turned out to be the mobile device most used to access Mequoda.com. That includes all smartphones and Android-powered devices. This information isn’t too surprising since the iPad is the most popular tablet device on the market. However, what I found interesting, was that iPad users had the highest pages per visit than any other user that comes to our website. This is even compared to browser-based visitors. On average, iPad users viewed about six percent more pages per visit than other visitors.

Beyond these observations, there are a few other digital magazine publishing statistics that are relevant to publishers. For instance, according to Digital Digest, “magazines rank #1 out of 16 media outlets for consumers having a positive and credible impression of advertising.” This is good news for digital magazine publishers since tablets offer an inherent rich-media advertising opportunity. Alignment can be created between content and advertising, and can lead to direct purchasing.

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Another stat from Digital Digest boasts that “44% of print subscribers claim to be ‘digital enabled’ and have a tablet or electronic device where they read magazines.”

I concluded that tablet users had a higher engagement level with our content as they viewed more pages per visit on their device. A new survey from Shop.org and Forrester Research State of Retailing Online found that almost 50% of retailers had a higher average value on orders on tablets compared to traditional web sales.

Finally, for those digital magazine publishing gurus with content in the Android market, Google is adding subscription billing to the Android App Store. All of these subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set monthly or annually. And although more tablet users are iPad owners, according to TechCrunch, “if you look at revenue on a per-user basis (of how a paying user spends on average), it’s actually almost the same on iOS and Android.

Although the tablet market is still only generating small amounts of revenue for digital publishers, there is clearly progress being made. And the users that already exist are using their devices to the fullest – consuming content and making purchases. The potential in tablet devices is certainly something that digital publishers are interested in. As the amount of devices owned increases, the significance of these devices may grow even more.

What types of statistics are you seeing related to your content and tablets? Please share your story in the comments below.

Comments
    Paul N.

    > As the amount of devices owned increases, the significance of these devices may grow even more.

    By 2016 75% of population in more developed countries will have tablet with them at all time. Tha will change landscape quite a lot.

    For stats: 15,4% of my users are mobile users, 87% of them own Apple devices, rest is Android (and that last 0,5% are mysterious never seen devices :))

    Anyway I’m glad I work for comapny that delivers solutions for mobile publishers, and mainly iOS users. That adds up to quite huge market 🙂

    Reply
    Terre G.

    My analytics shows that our traffic is coming from the iphone vs ipad by 2 to 1 and they use about 4 pages and up per visit

    Reply

    Thanks for the informative post. My site gets about 10-12% of traffic from mobile devices, with about a third each coming from iPad and iPhone and 20% from Android. Users access slightly less pages on their digital devices than on browsers. I’ll be adding a specific iPad app soon which will likely change things.

    Reply

      Good luck with the addition of your iPad app. I’m sure that will be another source of traffic for you.

      Reply

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