Complete Story
02/17/2017
Print still refuses to surrender
Print is the past and online is the future, as all can attest. But a new study by Neil Thurman indicates that print isn’t quite prepared to surrender to online. According to Thurman’s research, a whopping 88.5 percent of the total time U.K. readers devote to 11 national newspaper brands—Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Mail, Mirror, et al.—is spent on the print edition. Only 7.49 percent of reader time goes to mobile and a mere 4 percent to PCs.
Guardian readers spend 43 minutes a day on the print version and only 0.68 minutes on the online version. Readers of The Mail spend 39 minutes on print versus 2 minutes to the online edition. And so on down the list. “U.K. national newspaper brands engage each of their online visitors for an average of less than 30 seconds a day, but their print readers for an average of 40 minutes,” Thurman writes.
Are the Brits just slow readers? Nope, says Thurman, who drew on a year’s worth of data: “Time spent reading print newspapers doesn’t vary much country-to-country, and neither do online dwell times.”
Thurman’s work follows the research of University of Texas scholar H. Iris Chyi, who criticized the newspaper industry for splurging on online editions when real profits remain in the fading print product. In correspondence, Thurman points to a Deloitte study that found that 88 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenues comes from print, making time spent reading and money collected a near percentage match. Like Chyi, Thurman thinks newspapers need to rethink resources they’ve allocated to online editions. He believes his research should raise questions about the wisdom of the online expansion of U.K. newspapers to nondomestic markets: Both the Guardian and the Mail have taken their product to the United States and elsewhere. The Guardian, which has invested deeply in its online editions, reported declines last summer in its digital revenues. In the fall, it announced that it would cut 30 percent of its U.S. staff.
The study butters the toasty feelings for print that I expressed last year. As convenient as a smartphone may be when you want to sneak a nibble of news or gather a few sports scores and the weather report on the fly, for a genuine reading experience, nothing yet beats ink on paper. It’s telling that Thurman found smartphones outperforming PCs for reader time, indicating perhaps that if people are going to sit and read they’d rather do it on something other than a monitor.
