Let’s go back to Christmas Past. In 1983, the country was consumed with an obsession for chubby-faced little dolls known as The Cabbage Patch Kids. Legends of frenzied parents inciting riots in hopes of getting their hands on the toys spread across the land. While we’ve seen some Tickle Me Elmo-type of mania in the years since the Cabbage Patch reigned supreme, no gift item has been as hotly-sought-after and clamored for. But iPads, eReaders and tablets of all shapes and sizes are certainly inching in on the Cabbage Patch Kids’ territory.
The brand new Kindle Fire has proven to be the leader of the tablet pack with staggering holiday weekend sales that have already made it Amazon’s top-selling product — and the season has just started. This holiday tablet explosion made us wonder: Are mobile marketers and blog creation wizards ready for the demand of tablet-friendly content?
According to AdWeekly, the answer would be no. AW notes that many publishers and brands were quick to hop on the iPad publishing bandwagon, releasing all kinds of fancy custom apps which served as exclusive iPad magazines. The only problem is that the same publishing companies had to worry about how they were going to get readers on other tablets like Droids and Kindles. Now expensive and zippy interactive content is being dumped by publishers in favor of solid content. Steve Sachs, an executive vice president of consumer marketing and sales at Time Inc., tells AdWeekly, “The No. 1 benefit is to have a great reading experience reading the tablet. Interactive elements are valuable to (readers,) but they’re a secondary benefit.”
For those of us who blog for business, this shift away from snazzy tablet gadgets is great news. The tablet generation is in essence a new generation of readers. Sure, there’s the game and shopping elements, but at the end of the day, the folks who buy tablets are people who enjoy reading. Blog readership on Kindle and iPad is through the roof, so this could be one fad that helps put our content in front of new audiences.
Hmm… We wonder if a tablet-inspired dance can’t be far behind.
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