Websites catering to the youth and young adults have noted that 31% of their site traffic was channeled from tablets and mobiles in the first half of 2013, as confirmed by recent figures revealed by w00t! Media.
Website traffic driven by tablets has accelerated by 320 percent in the first half of 2013 in comparison to figures for the entire year of 2012, with Apple devices taking the lead by accounting for 91% of tablet visits. Beyond Apple’s successful penetration of the youth tablet market, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab was noted as driving the second highest number of visits (2.9%), followed closely by Amazon’s Kindle (2.8%) and Google’s Nexus (1.8%).
The study was based on a composite of over two billion visits to entertainment and lifestyle websites targeted at 16-34 year olds, with the websites collectively attracting almost 9.4 million unique UK visitors.
In comparison with comScore data, which depicts the tablet share of webpage visits at 8.7 percent of all page views in the UK, the study revealed that one in eight visits (12%) in the first half of 2013 were attributable to tablets, predicting that this figure will close at 15 percent at the end of the year.
Site traffic through smartphones exceeded that by tablets (19%) in the first half of 2013, seeing an increase of 137 percent in the number of visits since 2012. This figure is expected to rise by another 60 percent over the second half of 2013.
Compared to its successes in tablet penetration, Apple’s share of smartphone visits fell by six percentage points from 2012 to 70 percent in the first half of 2013. The loss was, in fact, Android’s gain, which saw its smartphone visit rate go up by the six percentage points to 25 percent. The balance of five percent is credited to producers of other devices, including Blackberry and Windows, for visits to this particular category of websites.
These figures have implications for website design and interactivity, which need to accommodate the multiple devices being utilised by the target market for accessing site content.
Dan McDevitt, joint Managing Director of w00t! Media says: “Both publishers and advertisers need to stay relevant to their audiences but this is crucial to those targeting Generation Y. The IAB recently shows that 11% of the UK’s 100 biggest advertisers use responsive design – sites that automatically display content in the most appropriate way for whichever device a consumer is using. When targeting youth audiences around entertainment and lifestyle content, adoption levels simply can’t be that low, or all parties run the risk of becoming quickly out-of-date.”
