If you’re involved in the news business or simply have a smart phone, you don’t need anyone to tell you that more and more people are consuming more and more news on mobile devices. But even if you know that, seeing the actual numbers will probably surprise you.
Sometime in the next couple weeks, visits from mobile devices will hit 20% of the total visits to TPM. The percentage has more than doubled in the last year. But as you can see from the chart below, the speed is accelerating. The percentage is now growing at more than 1% a month.
As you can also see, at least among our readership (which is a disproportionately Mac audience), the mobile space is still totally dominated by iOS mobile devices created by Apple.
Publishers are used to thinking of the web version of their site as the real thing. Mobile is incredibly important, yes. But still, it’s easy to treat it as sort of a to-go version of the real thing. But these numbers and these rates of growth show that approach is rapidly getting overrun by changing use patterns. To me, as a publisher, it’s not so much the absolute numbers. It’s that your ‘website’ is no longer your ‘site’. You can no longer equate your digital publication or presence with your website. It’s just one iteration of it. And that is a real sea-change in digital publishing.
