Some interesting stats from a presentation given in Belgium by electronic publisher mobile web putting the reach of tablets such as the iPad into perspective.   Though it obviously has a Belgian focus there are still some good talking points in there such as:

* Tablets are set to have a major role in enterprise.

According to the Alphawise CIO survey, 51% will purchase tablets for their employees in a year (which of course is not the same as saying as that they will purchase it for all employees) as a lot of businesses realise, tablets are much more than toys.   For example at Rabbit when we are out on a job or event, we tend to take our iPads with us, but not our laptops.

* As anyone who owns an iPad will know, one of its main uses is as a media consumption device.  54% read ebooks, magazines and newspapers on tablets, compared to 27% on PCs. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch is not so off the mark after all.   Other major tablet uses – listening to music (52%), playing games (52%) and watching video (51%).

* Android might be slowly winning the volume game, but iPhone users are worth more, spending on average 32% more on utilities, 37% more on entertainment and a whopping 111% more on games

Useful stuff to throw in when people tell you that tablets are just glorified toys, the full presentation is up at the Mobile Web blog.

Related articles

• Global CIO: iPad Versus Motorola Xoom: Apps Give Apple Huge Advantage (informationweek.com)
• Majority of CIOs surveyed are buying tablets for employees (slashgear.com)
• Why CIOs Shouldn’t Waste Time With Tablet Strategies (terryolgin.wordpress.com)
• Why 2011 Is the Year of the Tablet (pcworld.com)
• Will tablets take over enterprise work? More than half of large companies say yes (rossdawsonblog.com)

Last month there was a fair amount of comment around Rupert Murdoch’s much-stated faith in Apple’s iPad and his $30 million investment in an iPad only newspaper, provisionally called “Daily” – due for release in January.

A hint of what it might look like can be seen in the Sunday Times iPad app, which, actually – having swapped it for the print edition today – is pretty good.   Just like Richard Branson’s iPad magazine ‘Project’ it mimics the newspaper reading experience pretty well by using the iPad’s screen, and like Project it adds in interactive extras such as film clips.

Signing up to a Times Plus digital subscription at £8 a month (around US $12.50), gives you access to both the Times and Sunday Times iPad apps, as well as the Times online paywall.   Given that the Sunday Times print edition already costs £2.20, you actually save money by switching to the iPad version, which begs the question if the result will be to canabilise its own print buyers.

There are questions over how many digital subscribers the Times / Sunday Times actually has.   Estimates range from 100k to 360k.     That’s certainly not a lot compared to, say, the Mail Online which according to Comscore sees 32 million people visit the newspaper’s site every month and was recently touted by the New York Times as an online newspaper publishing phenomenon.

But then again the counter argument is: Does that actually matter as not all visitors are created equally – or the fallacy of the ‘big number.’   Last year journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles wrote that 62.8% of visitors to the online editions of UK newspapers only look at a single page and leave – in other words online news is often treated as a commodity.   You find what you want and click away.

Arguably someone who pays will hang around, becoming more valuable to advertisers.   Time will tell if Rupert Murdoch is right and the business model he’s adopting combining online subscriptions with smartphone and tablet applications actually works.

(Chart Malcolm Coles)

Related articles

• Richard Branson announces Virgin’s magazine for iPad (guardian.co.uk)
• Richard Branson launching Virgin iPad magazine to rival Murdoch (telegraph.co.uk)
• Richard Branson vs Rupert Murdoch in iPad Magazine Wars Soon (slashgear.com)
• Sunday Times iPad app to launch on Friday (newstatesman.com)

Following Rupert Murdoch‘s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More importantly, Google is responsible for driving new readers Murdoch’s way – with over 44% of Google traffic coming from people who haven’t visited the WSJ in the past 30 days.

That last point is important – with 88% of newspaper reading time happening in print (note – reading time, not actual readers), the way we consume online media is, outside a community of news nerds, such as myself, very different.

The other month, UK media blogger Malcolm Coles looked at the online editions of the UK national newspapers and found that over 6/10 readers only read a single page, or article, and leave again. The conclusion is that there is less brand loyalty online for news.  We search for what we look for, we consume it, and we quickly move onto doing something else.  And if we encounter a paywall, we can easily find that content for free somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal at least does have a core of – paying – readers.  Looking at the UK tabloid, The Sun, Google is responsible for close to 20% of ‘upstream’ visits to the site according to Alexa. For The Times (see image below), that figure increases to over a quarter.

Given this much more single-minded way we now consume news, it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s sites fare if he does pull them away from search. From the evidence, if he really goes ahead with it, he might have to do an about turn very quickly.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google: Rupert Murdoch can block us if he wants to (telegraph.co.uk)
• News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google (news.sky.com)
• If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)