GfK MRI
A new survey from GfK MRI reports that four percent of adults have read a newspaper on a mobile app within the past 30 days. That compares with 3.7 percent who read a mobile magazine app. According to GfK, those percentages translate to less than 10 million adult app readers.
In line with another survey, released Thursday from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, GfK reports newspaper and magazine app users skew male and wealthy, with 69 percent of respondents likely to have household incomes greater than $100,000.
GfK also reports that Millennials, those currently 16 to 33 years old, are a potential bright spot for media companies. Those young adults are 73 percent more likely to have read a newspaper app in the last month.
Smart phone, tablet and mobile app usage is still too new, and confined to a largely affluent audience, to be necessarily predictive of future mobile consumer patterns.
However, it continues to be of interest that the mobile platforms may be developing to serve two distinct news audiences: affluent consumers, who are perhaps already traditional print readers; and young adults who may have never read a newspaper in print, but are comfortable doing so on a mobile app.
