ComScore and UKOM reveal UK tablet audience is 12.8m ahead of first tablet data rollout
ComScore and UK Online Measurement (UKOM) have revealed 12.8m people went online via tablets in the UK this July, ahead of the unveiling of their first wave of tablet data to the market next week (1 October).
The companies have been developing their first tablet metrics over the last year in response to the pressing commercial need to quantify the rise in multi-device media consumption habits.
The move makes ComScore’s MMX multi platform product the first UK online audience measurement system to integrate tablet user figures.
The new data has also revealed that the newspaper audience on tablets is a quarter of the size of the current PC audience, while 69 per cent of the total digital population uses more than one platform to go online each month.
Multiplatform users consume 23 per cent more digital content than PC-only users, according to the companies, which will reveal the full extent of the data next week.
The data is compiled from a mix of panel PC, mobile operator census data, and page-tag data from thousands of sites for both PC and tablet. It marks the first time de-duplicated, single, net cross-platform figures for each device.
Pages, sites, and video players which carry the ComScore tag receive data for tablet, but it doesn’t yet estimate for those that don’t.
The next phase in the rollout will incorporate mobile application duration metrics, which will be added in due course
UKOM’s general manager James Smythe told The Drum: "Consumers' media behaviour has a habit of changing faster than it can be measured, which holds back the economic development of new platforms.
“One of UKOM's three jobs is to bring together the industry's brains and comScore's data to get new data to the market faster, and it seems the move to de-duplicated Multi-Platform measurement is just in time.
“The other things we do are to make sure the data can be trusted, and industry education to cut through the complexity of counting people online."
Newspapers are seeing a higher proportion of page views on tablets than smartphone devices, accounting for a quarter of all web traffic, according to the new figures.
Meanwhile PC traffic has "peaked" with year-on-year falls in page views, dropping 9 per cent for all 44.6 million UK web users, 25 per cent for the 7.5m 15 to 24 year-olds and 12 per cent for the 9.6 million Londoners, according to the data.
ComScore and UKOM will release the full wave of multiplatform data at an event next Tuesday.
Jamie Walters, product development director at Metro, said that the arrival of the ComScore data would help it "showcase mobile’s success" and build audience understanding.