An einem Workshop der Federal Trade Commission referierte Google-Chefökonom Hal Varian am vergangenen Dienstag zum Thema «Newspaper Economics, Online and Offline». Martin Langeveld hat Varians Präsentation für das Nieman Journalism Lab zusammengefasst und der Zusammenfassung ein Transkript des Vortrags angehängt. Nichts Weltbewegendes zwar, aber dennoch lesenswert, insbesondere wenn man sich in einem zweiten Browserfenster gleichzeitig Varians Slides (PDF) anzeigen lässt.
Hier nur ein Auszug zu einem meiner Lieblingsthemen, der Verweildauer, also der Zeit, die User auf News-Websites und mit gedruckten Zeitungen verbringen:
- People spend 38 minutes per month on on-line news which works out [to] about 70 seconds a day. Whereas a person who reads a physical newspaper tends to spend about 25 minutes a day. There’s also time use studies to back these numbers up. So even though accessing news on-line is a very popular thing to do, it’s actually the case that people are not spending nearly as much time on the newspaper on-line as those people are who are reading a physical newspaper. Of course, they’re different populations, so you have to compare these carefully. But roughly speaking, about 3% of either page views or time accessing on-line news — sorry — 3% of the total access to newspapers is done on-line. [...]
Now this is a little bit of a paradox. Let me stop for a minute and show you the charts [Slide 17]. The paradox is, it’s popular to access news on-line, but they don’t spend time doing it. Why is that? That’s the mystery. How much time they do it compared to physically reading the newspaper. So I pulled some Google data and I looked at the time use pattern of access to Google news.[...]
What that [Slide 18] says is that people are accessing the news during the day a lot more frequently than they’re doing searches. And if you go over to look at the weekend, you can see the searches dramatically exceed the news, people are doing searches more on the weekend than they’re accessing the news. What that suggests to me is that people are accessing on-line news a lot during business hours. It’s not so surprising that they’re not spending a whole lot of time on it because offline news reading is a leisure-time activity. You do it over a cup of coffee, you do it in the evening, maybe. Whereas on-line news reading, that’s a labor time activity. [...]
So the challenge, I think, that’s facing the newspaper industry is to try to turn that on-line newspaper access which is much more attractive way to reach a broader audience is to increase involvement of the news by turning it back to a leisure-time activity.»
Den Verlagsunternehmen empfiehlt Varian:
- «And the three things newspapers should do is experiment, experiment, experiment.»