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The New York Post recently published an article showing TV usage had fallen 10.6 percent between September and January in my peer group of so-called millennials – those ages 18 to 34.
That’s more than twice the rate it had been falling as recently as 2012.
The kicker is that more video is being consumed than ever before. Now, it’s being done on phones, tablets and laptops using Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.
There are a lot of similarities in the news industry.
Younger readers are coming to us the same way they’re watching TV: through their phones, tablets and laptops.
Earlier this month, the Times Leader eclipsed 20,000 likes on Facebook. Nearly 40 percent of our audience there is in that coveted 18 to 34 demographic. (A fair number of our readers are 17 or younger.)
On timesleader.com, half of our digital audience is coming to us on mobile devices – phones and tablets – versus desktop or laptop computers.
That audience is rapidly growing.
Our digital team has been working behind-the-scenes on changes to timesleader.com that have resulted in record traffic for us. Some of the tweaks have been small – such as changing what type of stories are displayed in our News Updates list – while others have been huge – such as the multimedia reporting of the Hugo Selenski double-homicide trial.
To monitor what’s working and what’s not, we are analyzing data more closely than ever.
What we’ve found is that stories that used to garner a couple of thousand pageviews are now regularly generating three to four times that. As we’ve become more successful at marketing our journalism, readers are coming in droves.
Every day, it seems, brings more good news.
A recent Friday’s digital report showed a 27.49 percent increase in pageviews over the prior 30-day period. Thursday’s report showed a 29.43 percent increase. Wednesday’s report showed a 30.66 percent increase. While Selenski coverage helped a bit, trial news only cracked our top-three list one of those days.
This month, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson told attendees at the Code/Media 2015 conference what most news executives should already know. So-called newspaper wars won’t be won with newsprint.
Rather, he said, “The battle will be won on the smartphone.”