iPad users are big consumers of business news

Yahoo’s Ashley Cheng has released a second analysis of iPad usage across their various services eg Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News etc and the results confirmed what we thought eg iPad users are predominantly male, middle-aged (35+) and are all crazy for news, and the UK has one of the geekiest iPad markets in the world.

The current analysis is a follow up to a brief survey they conducted a week after the US launch of the iPad, however this  time around Yahoo were able to do more in depth questioning, and were working with a much larger sample which included the nine international countries where the device launched on May 28.

According to the analysis, the reason Yahoo are so interested in the iPad is that they had “observed a 7x increase in the number of users visiting Yahoo services from the iPad during the first two months after the iPad launched.”

While the gender discrepancy has decreased by 10 percentage points since the iPad launch – a 32 percent gap in May versus a 22 percent difference today – iPad users still skew male compared to Yahoo’s overall gender breakdown, which is roughly 1:1.

In the US, the gender split is 64 to 36 percent, male to female, and that figures holds true internationally, with the exception of Japan where the iPad audience is 80 percent male.

The shift in gender breakdown has coincided with changes in the services iPad users are accessing via their iPads, according to Yahoo.

Another notable difference is which properties these users are visiting on the Yahoo network. While Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Sports are still popular; Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Shopping, and Yahoo Travel increased 28%, 25%, and 22% respectively, compared to the Yahoo iPad Early Adopters.

As the iPad user base on Yahoo has increased, the interest in business/investment topics among these iPad users did not decrease. On the contrary, it grew 46% compared to the Yahoo iPad Early Adopters, or 130% more than an average Yahoo US user. The search category also has the highest penetration rate index; these Yahoo iPad users are 2.8 times more likely to search for investment-related information than the Yahoo ! U.S. average.

Yahoo has also been tracking the age distribution of iPad users on its services.

28 percent of iPad users on Yahoo are age 35-44 (42% higher than Yahoo U.S. average for that demographic) while only 8 percent of these iPad users are younger than 20 years old (43% lower than Yahoo U.S. average).

Unlike the U.S., interest levels in technology were substantially stronger in all nine countries, with the U.K., Australia, and Germany showing between 3–4 times higher interest than the U.S. On the Search side, technology and finance searches on the Yahoo! network were the strongest.

So we’re male, geeky, we love news and we’re old – Yes that just about sums up most of the people we know who own an iPad.
Is that true to your experience of the iPad? We’d be interested to know, comments below.

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