From Media Post
The digital landscape is as unsettled as ever for traditional news organizations, with the mobile era adding a new level of upheaval. While digital and mobile platforms are expanding the news audience, revenue streams from newer formats remain small.
On the audience side, the share of people getting news online or from a mobile device “yesterday” reached 39% — up from 34% in 2010, when the Pew Research survey was last conducted. Mobile is playing a key role in that growth, with 45% of U.S. adults now owning a smartphone and 31%, a tablet computer. And they are avid news consumers.
Fully 64% of tablet owners say they get news on their devices weekly, and 37% daily, with nearly identical figures for smartphone users. Moreover, 31% of tablet news users said they spend more time with news since getting their device. Another 43% said the tablet is adding to the amount of news they consume.
Even as readers migrate online, they still look mainly to established news brands. The sites of newspapers, cable and network news account for 20 of the top 25 most popular news sites. Yahoo News remained No. 1 in 2012, enjoying a traffic boost driven in part by its content partnership with ABC News.
Facebook and other social sites continued to drive traffic to those sites and expand their role in the news ecosystem. Nearly a fifth (19%) of Americans saw news or news headlines on a social network last year, up from 9% in 2010. That figure rises to 34% among those ages 18-24. Mobile is playing a key role here too, with 47% of smartphone users saying they got news via a social network “sometimes” or “regularly.”
