Poll: Twitter users don’t stick around
Twitter quitters outnumber the flock of habitual tweeters on the rapidly growing online communications service, a new study suggests.
Most people aren’t joining the Web site’s jumble of conversations for very long. More than 60 percent of Twitter’s U.S. users don’t return a month later, based on an analysis of traffic trends unveiled this week by the research firm Nielsen Online.
The lackluster retention rate of 40 percent suggests many people don’t see the point in spending time on Twitter, which allows anyone to write about what they’re doing or what’s on their mind in messages, or “tweets,” limited to 140 characters.
While some of the chirping is entertaining, thought-provoking or just downright helpful, much of the chatter can be quite banal as people update when they are eating, drinking, puking and even defecating.
It’s possible Nielsen Online is exaggerating Twitter’s retention problems because its tracking tools don’t account for applications on mobile phones and other devices that make it possible to tweet and read messages without going through the Web site. That limitation means Nielsen Online could be wrongly characterizing some active users as Twitter qu
Poll: Printed material still matters
Sure, plenty of readers are turning more to the Web for newspaper and magazine stories, but are they giving up on print altogether?
In many cases, yes, according to a recent study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. It found that 22 percent of Internet users have canceled a print subscription because they could get the same product online.
Not that nostalgia for the printed page has died altogether. The survey found that 61 percent of Internet users who read newspapers offline would miss the print edition if it disappeared. That’s up from 56 percent a year earlier.
The findings add some dimension to industry figures released this week showing newspapers losing circulation faster than ever. Average newspaper sales tumbled 7.1 percent in the six months from October to March from the same period a year earlier, according to an Audit Bureau of Circulations analysis of newspapers that had reported in both periods.
Associated Press
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