Upon reading the giant research article by Pew Research Center, “State of the News Media 2015,” I was intrigued and also not surprised by many of the findings. Every year Pew comes out with a new article analyzing viewer audiences among different media outlets in the United States. To name a few; podcasts, radio, online news and digital marketing are all included within.

When I started reading this article, I didn’t know what to expect out of all the graphs and data. The article states that 39 of 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers. Am I surprised? No. IPods and tablets have been the “new computers” within the past few years. Consumers would rather buy a tablet than buy a stationary desktop. During my present internship with Bosch, when my team analyzes our data, social or traditional, we find also that consumers are using their mobile devices to research products, read their emails and search the web.

As I continued reading the article, the article went a new direction and talked about financial benefits findings and how tech companies, such as Facebook, are making money off the content produced by media outlets.

Facebook now pulls in roughly a quarter (24%) of all display ad revenue. Let me break this down for you on how Facebook retains this. During my internship at Bosch I learned that if you write a post, the post would only go to about 5% of your followers. How does Facebook get you? If you hold a contest or it’s a special holiday and you want to build your Facebook community and brand, Facebook gives you an array of prices that lets you expand your reach. For example, boosting for $10 will up your reach to 10-12% of your followers. You are also aloud to then target certain audiences and ages. To put this in perspective how businesses use Facebook to increase audiences, in 2014, the website release its annual report stated that 62% of the $2.68 billion Facebook made from advertising in the second quarter– already comes from mobile advertising. This is one of the many ways Facebook collects money.

There were a lot of other huge findings in this article including Buzzfeed as number 7 on “Top Online News Entities” list with 77,992 digital populations in the sample month of January that intrigued me. I am a daily Buzzfeed user and when I log-on, I simply look for meme’s or articles that make fun of shows, take quizzes, etc. So I was surprised that Buzzfeed, a two and a half year old publication, was a main source of news in the country.

In a memo posted by Ze Frank, President of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, he mentions that Buzzfeed is rapidly growing. “A billion views in a month is an amazing accomplishment, but we are just at the beginning of building a giant global media company and there are many challenges ahead,” said Frank. As times are changing so are publications as they adjust and innovate towards their audiences mobile patterns. If you haven’t already, I would highly suggest to skim at the Pew Research article, you can learn a lot about the media industry and how publications are innovating towards their users patterns.