Guten Morgen!  I’m sitting here in the Vienna airport on my way back from this year’s GEN Summit, so I thought I’d use this opportunity to send a few interesting data bits your way.

The theme of this year’s conference was the rise of platform-driven news, and the role that the large tech companies are now playing in the media industry. Because of this, we thought it provided a great opportunity to talk about what we’re seeing across the Chartbeat network regarding the data behind distributed content, and how these platforms (i.e., Facebook & Google) are driving traffic, engagement, and user loyalty.  For those of you who couldn’t attend the Chartbeat Masterclass at the conference, head over to Slideshare to view the slides from my presentation.   

Here are a few takeaways you’ll find in the slides:

• More people are now visiting sites on mobile devices than on desktop devices.  Sure, you probably already knew this.  But did you know that in the EU, 48% of visits in May were from mobile devices, compared to 45% on desktops?  In the US, 51% of visits were on mobile devices, with 43% on desktops.
• The primary mode of behavior for a mobile audience is to land on an article page (and visit only a single article page).  Over 80% of mobile visits in both the EU and the US were to an article, and these visits typically come from Facebook (although traffic from Google is close behind).
• US audiences spent 30% more time engaged with articles on mobile devices than on desktops.  In the EU, however, the reverse is true.  For the EU, desktop-direct-to-landing page traffic is still strong with about 25% higher engaged times.

And my favorite:

• In May 2016, 50% more US users and 20% more EU users were socially loyal than directly loyal.  By socially loyal, I mean users who visit approximately every other day and come from a social referrer. This challenges our long-held notion that the “true” loyal audience is the audience that comes directly to our homepage. To me, this provides hope that in this mobile, article-first, driven-by-platforms world, quality content still prevails and will build a loyal audience.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note by email (dan@chartbeat.com) or tweet me @dpvalente