Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

U.S. mobile users becoming 'digital omnivores' (survey)

By | October 10, 2011, 12:57pm PDT

Summary: Cross-platform media consumption is reshaping the digital landscape as consumers use more devices to access content.

Smartphones and tablets are driving nearly seven percent of all digital traffic in the United States, according to a new survey from comScore.

Two-thirds of that can be attributed to smartphones alone, while tablets are quickly gaining speed as more than 116 million people by the end of August 2011 were using mobile devices to access the web and applications as well as download content.

Within that population, young males are the most frequent users as 54.7 percent of all tablet owners were male, nearly 30 percent were age 25-34, and almost half (45.9 percent) of tablet owners belonged to households earning $100,000 annually and more.

Mark Donovan, comScore’s senior vice president of mobile, explained in a statement that the popularity of smartphones and tablets are the primary contributors to an “explosion” in digital media consumption:

As these devices gain adoption, we have also seen the rise of the ‘digital omnivores’ – consumers who access content through several touchpoints during the course of their daily digital lives. In order to meet the needs of these consumers, advertisers and publishers must learn to navigate this new landscape so they develop cross-platform strategies to effectively engage their audiences.

News and social media providers should listen up in particular. Nearly three out of five tablet owners consume news on their tablets and updated their social networking status or commented on friends’ status messages during September. Additionally, Pandora accounted for more than half of their total cross-platform audience.

As for the devices themselves, Apple is leading the way as iOS accounts for the largest share of U.S. smartphones and tablets at 43.1 percent of the combined market, along with the largest share of Internet traffic, measured in terms of browser-based page views,. That is largely thanks to the iPad, which has yet to meet its match in the tablet space.

Android, however, won the highest share of the smartphone market for another month running with 43.7 percent in August.

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Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Disclosure

Rachel King

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

Biography

Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Before serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

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develop CROSS-platform strategies - Indeed
Lazarus439 12th Oct
I agree - and they need to keep in mind that everyone isn't surgically connected to Facebook and/or Tweeter. I got an email from the dealer where I bought my last car, telling me about "special offers" available only via Facebook.

Since I don't "Facebook", I suppose I'll find a different dealer next time I need a car.
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'Come here, try this "cloud" and let us know'.

Just wait until bandwidth caps become tighter because of, no surprise here, more people are using cloud-based everything.

Never mind Ip ownership/copy-taking issues, security (a BIG issue), when the cloud provider goes out of business, if you stop paying how soon do you lose all and don't forget that the systems are being closed so you can't easily make a local copy of your own data, etc...

All eggs. One basket. Not-a-tasty omelet.
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0 Votes
+ -
I agree - and they need to keep in mind that everyone isn't surgically connected to Facebook and/or Tweeter. I got an email from the dealer where I bought my last car, telling me about "special offers" available only via Facebook.

Since I don't "Facebook", I suppose I'll find a different dealer next time I need a car.

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