The story is about entertainment and mobile; the facts underlying it are important for you to understand. Laura Holson reports in the NYT on how the relentless pursuit of information about celebrities has washed over the mobile landscape. Anyone can become part of the paparazzi with their mobile phone and instantly upload their celebrity siting to various websites. Celebrity gossip, entertainment news, text alerts and live red carpet broadcasts can be instantly accessed from your mobile device as well ...as smartphones, with their faster connections and improved
graphics, became more popular, particularly among women, People.com
explored the idea this year of retooling its Web site to make it more
user friendly for owners of BlackBerrys and iPhones. People, like
several news organizations, including its rival E!, is creating a
specific application for the iPhone dedicated to celebrity news.
Getting beyond the tactics, she quotes these factoids - for your consideration.
- One of the most popular mobile sites for celebrity news is Yahoo Entertainment, which recently had 2.9 million visitors, according to Nielsen. Lee Ott, global director of Yahoo’s mobile search strategy and services, said that 4 out of every 10 people used oneSearch, Yahoo’s mobile service, to find entertainment and celebrity news. By contrast, Yahoo Sports had 2 million visitors and Yahoo Finance had 1.5 million, Nielsen reported. Such services are at the intersection of two powerful demographic trends: the young are entertainment obsessed, and they are addicted to their mobile phones.
- 30 percent of People magazine readers now use their mobile phone to access People.com. (Headlines and celebrity photographs are the most popular items.)
- Verizon Wireless estimates that two years ago, mobile content was consumed mostly by cellphone users older than 25 years old. Today that figure is more like 34 years old.
New mobile phones are coming to market that are making it even easier for people to have instant access to information they want when and where they want it - the iPhone may have accelerated the trend of people using their phones to access the web. “We are getting past the early adopters and attracting a more mainstream audience,” said John Najarian, executive vice president for digital media and business development for the Comcast Entertainment Group, the division of Comcast that owns E!
I recently learned that the CDC has it first pages up on a new mobile site. Is that the future of public health, health communications and social marketing, or are we simply trying to catch up with people's present reality?
Comments