Do iPad Owners Read More News?

After Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad earlier this year, many analysts and reporters said it was the ideal device to consume content. With its large screen, long battery life and great portability many publishers were quick to embrace the iPad, with many heralding it as the savior for the publishing industry. So has the iPad lived up to the hype? Now that the iPad has been on the market for almost two months, we decided to do a little digging to see if the iPad was indeed a leading content consumption device.

First stop, the iTunes App Store. The App Store is buzzing with new apps and content apps are one of the most popular categories. If you take a look at the PadGadget Apps Tracker, you’ll find that over 20% of the Top 100 iPad apps are content related (news, information, movies, etc.) and include hits like; Wired, Vanity Fair, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Kindle and Marvel Comics. So it’s clear that people like their news and content apps, but are they really using them?

Simply looking at it from an app demand side, it seems that iPad owners do use their device to consume news at a higher rate, but let’s dig a little deeper. We looked at our PadGadet website stats to check the browsing behavior of iPad users versus the rest of our visitors using computers or mobile phones. Our iPad readers are definitely more engaged, with the average iPad user consuming 18% more web pages than their non-iPad peers. Not only did our iPad readers consume more content, they also stayed about 15% longer on our site. Our iPad numbers are higher, but certainly not an exponential increase over non-iPad visitors.

One of the best usage indicators might be to compare reader behavior on a news website vs that same content delivered using an iPad app. MoccoNews recently interviewed Alisa Bowen, SVP for Thomson Reuters’ Consumer Publishing Division, and found that their app "NewsPro, with news and basic market data, has clocked over 75,000 downloads and is showing triple the user session time of Reuters.com". The iPad, according to Bowen, is "the perfect platform to engage with C-level executives." A 300% increase in session time over the same content available on the Reuters website definitely shows that iPad readers do consume more content from certain publishers. It clearly demonstrates how a rich media application can help publishers increase reader engagement and interact with readers in new ways.

Based on our informal research, it definitely looks like the iPad is becoming the premier portable news and information consumption device for many people. We expect we’ll be hearing more news directly from Apple and publishers on the iPad around Apple’s upcoming Worldwide developers Conference.

[via Pad Gadget]