back to article Whither the PC? Mobes, slabs drive majority of traffic for top news sites

Most of the top news websites get more traffic from handheld gadgets than desktop computers – a not-so-shocking result that serves to underline the soaring sales of phones, and possibly the emergence of today's clickbaity 30-second-attention-span media. The figures come from Pew Research and ComScore, and apparently show that …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The reverse

      The majority of El Reg readership runs a background Reader thread while at work. So my guess would be that it was, it is and will be something accessed via PC/Mac/Linux.

      Compared to that, I am not going to browse the beeb, guardian or the torygraph while working. That is reserved for slab/phone usage while having a break.

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. ZSn

    m.theregister.co.uk

    Do I count as a mobile or desktop - beacuse I *always* use the m.theregister.co.uk site - and mostly from a desktop. It's a lot faster and cluttered than the desktop site. This speeds up just about any site you can imagine, the BBC news site is almost pleasant without all the crud.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Antonymous Coward
        IT Angle

        Re: m.theregister.co.uk

        Does Reg publish user agent stats? One might think it might... considering itself a source of "Independent news, views, opinions and reviews on the latest in the IT industry."

    2. Mint Sauce

      Re: m.theregister.co.uk

      Do I count as a mobile or desktop - beacuse I *always* use the m.theregister.co.uk site

      <aol>Me too!</aol>

      Still wish they had a proper feed of just 'latest article first' though.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The statistics will get distorted as more news sites adopt the approach of white space, big pictures, high contrast, and minimal text on their front page. Desktop users will just stop reading those pages.

    At the moment my desktop daily reading order and amount of time spent on the respective sites is El Reg, the Daily Telegraph, and the Independent. The Guardian and BBC News have dropped to a quick glance at the end of the day - which is all my eyes can take. The Independent is getting perilously close to being relegated to that category too.

    El Reg was also relegated to that "end of day" glance recently - actually more like "every few days" - until the Firefox userContent.css restored some sanity to the displayed format.

    I did try the BBC News on my Kindle Paper White browser - but didn't find that the format conveyed any advantage for that device.

    It might be argued that the apparently short attention span of phone/mobile/tablet readers might be because they also find the format too awkward to spend much time on it.

    1. Steve Foster

      @AC

      The new BBC news web site works much better with JavaScript disabled. That gets rid of all the silly stuff, and leaves the actual news stories. Story images go a bit lo-res, as they seem to be using JS to optimise the pictures in some way too (that I haven't investigated closely).

  5. Radelix

    Tbf I read El Reg while on the phone since it is usually more interesting than whatever problem my user has claimed to not cause.

  6. PleebSmash
    Megaphone

    RSS the best

    The right way to visit news sites.

  7. MotionCompensation

    it's the ads

    Desktop readers of Yahoo!'s news network in January 2015 averaged 3.9 minutes per visit, or 2.3 minutes for mobile. Those reading NBC News Digital sites on desktops spent 5.1 minutes poring over stories, or 2.6 minutes for mobile.

    I guess the desktop users need more time to find the actual story between the ads.

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