The New York Times Has 60 Million Mobile Views Per Month
Consumption of news on mobile devices is on the rise. At The New York Times, there were 60 million mobile views in April, nearly double the number from April 2008.
The paper gets about 10 million views per month on the iPhone alone, a Times spokesperson told Beet.TV.
According to The Nielsen Company, there are 53.4 million mobile Internet users in the United States with 22.3 of them using their mobile to access news.
New Nielsen numbers find CNN is by far the biggest player with 11.6 million unique mobile users. Second is msnbc.com with 3 million, The New York Times with 2.4 million, the Wall Street Journal with 1.7 million and the Washington Post with 700,000. (Nielsen just only uniques not total views.)
Last week at the Mediabistro Internet Week event, I caught with Rob Samuels who heads mobile products for The New York Times Company.
Mobile as an Advertiser Platform
The Times has several advertisers including the campaign for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Cisco and the State of Pennsylvania. Does mobile advertising work?
On Friday I spoke by phone with Maria Mandel, Senior Partner, Executive Director Digital Innovation Ogilvy about the value of mobile advertising.
She said that with about 20 percent of mobile users accessing the Internet, it has become a viable environment. She predicts that the percentage of mobile users who access the web will soon reach 30 percent. This is a milestone which says will put the medium in a “whole other world.”
The iPhone may be a big game changer for mobile news consumption. Maria says that 80 percent of iPhone users browse the Web.
She says that the click through rates for mobile advertising is 2 percent compared to .2 percent for Web banner ads.
She says that SMS is “ready for primetime” with some 60 percent of mobile users texting these days.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer