August 20th, 2010 → 12:52 pm @ josh
Go Figure, the blog of NPR’s Audience Insight & Research group, posted some very interesting data showing hour-by-hour audience patterns for visitors to NPR’s online and mobile channels, and compares them with public radio broadcast listening.
The first slides (embedded below) show the number of listeners to NPR member stations side-by-side with visitors to NPR.org. On weekdays, rush hour commuting boosts radio listening and delivers the largest audiences to local stations in the morning and late afternoon. In contrast, visitors to NPR.org shoot up around 9 AM, after folks get to work and find themselves “occasionally” browsing the web. The NPR.org visitor numbers stay strong throughout the workday hours.
NOTE: On the NPR blog, they emphasize that the slides with radio and web numbers have two separate axes (red for web, blue for broadcast). Looking closely at the numbers, you can see that NPR broadcasts on local public radio stations remain NPR’s largest source of audience.
Moving forward in the slides, you see the data for NPR’s mobile offerings. The NPR News iPhone app brings in the largest number of visitors and shows a significant peak during the weekday morning commute. You may be surprised to find NPR’s mobile formatted website (m.npr.org, counted separately from NPR.org here) sits well ahead of the NPR apps for Android smartphones and the iPad. The iPad and Android apps are more recent additions and it will be interesting to see how this data evolves over the next year. And I like how the iPad has a bump in traffic around 10 pm. It looks like many iPads spend the night on the bedside table!
More reaction and analysis to this data from Fortune, TechFlash, and Journalists.co.uk.