Study: Mobile devices continue to dominate news consumption

Mobile visitors continue to outpace those from desktops for news sites, according to a study out Wednesday.

A Pew Research Center report found that significantly more traffic for 99 of 110 news organizations surveyed came from mobile, as opposed to desktop, devices. That was up from 71 in the fourth quarter of 2014.

{mosads}The rise was true across categories, including newspapers and news magazines.

The number of newspapers to saw their mobile traffic outpace their desktop traffic increased from 28 in 2014 to 44 in 2015. All eight national television outlets studied now receive a majority of their web traffic from mobile devices.

Pew found that every digital news outlet they studied was on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Most used Instagram and half were on Snapchat.

The rise of smartphones has been transformative for the news business. It has forced them to rethink their digital presence not just for smartphones but for the many social media platforms their audience members use to access news on their phones.

The rapid rise in smartphone use has driven policymakers to look to free up more spectrum, the frequencies mobile devices use to transmit and download data, to meet the demand.

The Pew researchers based their traffic analysis on data from ComScore, a popular tool for measuring web traffic. The measurements were based on data from October 2015 through December 2015.