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No, Kindle Fire Owners Don’t Read More Magazines & Newspapers Than iPad Owners

Some fascinating results of a survey were released yesterday by comScore, but they don’t mean quite what you think.

Yesterday’s news is based on a 3 month study of around 6 thousand tablet owners in the US. comScore found that KF owners were more likely to read newspapers and magazines on a regular basis than iPad, Nook Tablet, and Android tablet owners.

There’s a chart and everything on the conScore website, and you can mosey on over to The Next Web for a detailed write up.

I’m skipping the stats because I want to discuss the blind spot in the study (and I don’t see a point in duplicating TNW). There’s something I don’t see mentioned in the original press release nor in the article on TNW.

Actually, there are 2 points which I think TNW missed. The first is that the response rates given by various tablet owners don’t differ by very much. Kindle Fire owners might be more likely to read newspapers and magazines but they are not that much more likely to read them than iPad owners.

And the other point pertains to content providers. If you’re looking at these numbers and thinking that the Kindle Fire is a better bet because the average owner is more likely to read your content, think again.

The number you should be looking at is not in this report. The important number here is the quantity of devices in use, not the propensity of the average owner for reading the content (plus you want subscribers, not readers).

There are vastly more iPads out there than any other device (bar the iPhone), and that means the total number of people reading magazines and newspapers on the iPad is probably greater than the number of Kindle Fires sold. While the percentage might be lower, the group it refers to is larger in absolute terms.

I suppose someone might tell me that this is obvious, and perhaps it is now that I’ve written it. But I didn’t think it was. I think it turns the data on its head.

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Comments


Tim Gray October 19, 2012 um 3:27 am

Haven’t followed link, but "more likely than" sounds like it’s pretty clearly about the average user and nothing to do with how many there are.


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