Publication engagement said to be much higher on an app than on a website

Word from Britain is that readers spend more time reading a publication using apps on a tablet than on the publication's own website. A story from paidContent.org  about research by Tiger Spike says that tablet users spend an average of 30 to 34 minutes on the sites it has developed for clients such as the Telegraph Media Group, The Economist, the Australian and the Mail Online. It also found that page views are five times the average for publications consumed on the web.

At a recent City University panel discussion, News International’s chief marketer Katie Vanneck-Smith said, since introducing charges, The Times readers are “three times more engaged in terms of propensity to comment, time spent on website, they click more to advertisers”. This is likely because fleeting users, who arrived on single pages via search engines, have been turfed out. Previous research shows some tablet owners have shifted their reading of articles from the web and daytime to the evening and tablet.