Tablet may not be newspapers' remedy

Print sector’s faith in iPads and Kindles is yet to be fully rewarded

WILL IT be an iPad Christmas or a Kindle New Year? The one answer the print media industry doesn’t want to hear in response to this question is “Neither, I’ll stick to my laptop, thanks”. With multiple Christmas gift guides counting various makes of tablet computers and e-readers among their gadget must-haves, it’s not hard to infer an element of wishful thinking.

This thinking goes that the culture-of-free in internet browsing is so ingrained at this point that only new technology, bringing a new reader experience, can facilitate the transition to a paywall era and restore revenues lost to the ravages of declining print circulation.

This “tablet-as-saviour” theory is something of a “fingers crossed” approach. But a study published in October by the non-profit US think tank Pew Research Center (which calls itself a “fact tank”) has found that the monetising potential of tablet apps some 18 months after the iPad was first introduced is not – to put it bluntly – all that.

The majority of the 11 per cent of US adults who now own a tablet computer said they were not willing to pay for news content on the devices. Some 77 per cent of the 1,159 tablet owners surveyed were identified as “tablet news users” who accessed news at least once a week. But only 14 per cent of this group had paid directly for news content on their tablets.

There were positives for newspapers in the Pew research, conducted in collaboration with the Economist Group. Not least of these was the finding that half of tablet owners consume news on their devices daily.

Three in 10 of the tablet news users said they spent more time getting news than they did before they bought their tablet, with only a fraction spending less time. A third also said they turned to new sources for news on their tablet, pointing to opportunities for expanded readership bases.

Some four in 10 users reported they regularly enjoyed both a quick scan of the headlines and longer dwell times with in-depth articles. Users were prone to “incidental” reading of long-form articles they had not initially sought out, indicating potential for publishers to attract intermittent visitors – the kind judged more likely to click on ads.

For newspapers racing to develop subscription – and advertising-friendly apps for iPad and its cousins – the most worrying discovery made by the Pew researchers is perhaps this one: the users in its study did not, in fact, all ditch their desktop internet browsers in favour of publishers’ self-contained apps. Browsers were still the most popular means of consuming news, with just a fifth saying they accessed news primarily through apps – a statistic worth mulling by media groups yet to set a budget for bespoke tablet app design.

Those surveyed were the early adopters, of course, and they’re likely to overlap with the same group of news consumers who shun print products in favour of free online journalism. It has yet to be seen whether print-sticklers will mirror the news consumption habits of the early adopters once they follow them into the tablet market – assuming that they eventually do join at some point.

A survey published by the Central Statistics Office last Friday points to some more basic reasons why Irish media companies will think twice about putting all their investment eggs in the app-economy just yet. It found that the percentage of Irish adults who access the internet daily or weekly stood at 63 per cent in 2010, slightly below the EU average and significantly below the UK, where the figure was 80 per cent. Half the population of Ireland has never made an online purchase of any kind, let alone paid for news.

Newspapers that move too fast away from investment in their print editions risk losing paying readers into this digital black hole. Yet at the same, if they don’t keep up with the pace of change in tablet-land, they will squander the opportunity to catch the hoped-for revenue upswing if and when tablets really do become that mass market must-have.