A new research report from comScore shows that the number of Europeans accessing news on their smartphones has risen by 74% in the past year. Its study of ‘mobile news’ access in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom revealed that almost 37% of all smartphone users looked at online news via an app or web browser, an increase of 74% over the past year.
In total, 39.5 million people said they’d used their mobile to look at news at least once a month on average during the three-month period ending January 2012.
The UK showed the highest penetration in the ‘EU5’ with 46.8% of smartphone users saying they’d accessed news sites at least once in the past month and 15.8% looking at news almost every day. The highest percentage increase came from Spain, which reported a 127% increase in monthly news access and a 160% increase in near-daily news access.
Hesham Al-Jehani, product manager for Mobile at comScore Europe, said “The continued growth in smartphone adoption in Europe has fuelled the increasing consumption of news and information on-the-go. Today’s mobile consumer wants to be plugged into what’s happening around them every second of the day, and their smartphones are enabling them to do that. This rapidly changing trend brings with it significant incremental opportunity for news publishers to extend their audiences, but also the challenges of delivering their content effectively through the small screen.”