Whither the PC? Mobes, slabs drive majority of traffic for top news sites

Want to actually read the story? Fire up your desktop

Most of the top news websites get more traffic from handheld gadgets than desktop computers – a not-so-shocking result that serves to underline the soaring sales of phones, and possibly the emergence of today's clickbaity 30-second-attention-span media.

The figures come from Pew Research and ComScore, and apparently show that found that 39 of the top 50 news websites get the majority of their traffic from mobile browsers versus desktops. About 50 per cent of US adult Facebook users find their politics news via the social network, Pew reckons.

It's no secret that mobile browsing has been on the rise, but this latest study puts the mobe/desktop split at a little over three to one. This is no surprise given Apple just shifted 61 million iPhones and 12.6 million iPads in a quarter, let alone the millions of other smartphones and tablets shipped by the Android makers. In the background, desktop sales have been wobbly for years.

Meanwhile, just 10 of the top 50 sites had users who spent more time reading news on a mobile than a desktop. So while most sites get the bulk of their visitors via handhelds, those who stick around to read the actual articles are in the minority on desktops.

Desktop readers of Yahoo!'s news network in January 2015 averaged 3.9 minutes per visit, or 2.3 minutes for mobile. Those reading NBC News Digital sites on desktops spent 5.1 minutes poring over stories, or 2.6 minutes for mobile.

"Desktop visitors to these sites tend to spend more time per visit than do mobile visitors," wrote Amy Mitchell, Pew's director of journalism research, in her report.

"For half of these top 50 news sites – which include legacy print, cable, network, international and public broadcasting outlets as well as digital-only entities – visitors from desktops stay longer than those coming through mobile."

However, Mitchell doesn't think the rise of mobile will mean the end to in-depth reporting. "It doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t do long-form content," she added. "It means that the ways people connect are different."

In total, the market for online ads was listed as $50.7bn, up 18 per cent on the year. $19bn of that was spent on mobile ads, or 37 per cent of all spending. Last year, mobile ads were 25 per cent of the total bounty.

The haul was mainly split up amongst the big players; Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo! managed to nab 61 per cent of revenues. The Yahoo-ABC network was ranked as the largest digital news outfit, followed by CNN, NBC News Digital, Huffington Post and CBS News.

The research house estimates that local TV news revenues in the US ballooned to $20.3bn last year, with $19.4bn coming from on-air advertisements and $900m credited to online ads. By 2019, the online ad take is expected to top $1bn.

Newspapers pulled $16.4bn in ad revenues last year and $3.5bn from digital. Overall, the figures remained well below the 2005 mark of $49.4bn in ad spending, though digital revenues were at their highest.

El Reg traffic figures, by the way, sit at around 70 per cent from desktop and 30 per cent from phones and tablets. ®