Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank) yesterday released additional data from its 2008 study, which includes information on lifestyle behaviour, retail shopping and product usage for 22 urban markets. This is the first year that New Brunswick cities Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton have participated in this portion of the study, which is conducted by a mail survey. In order to reflect the changing media environment, several new questions were included in the survey, for instance about social media and online consumer trends, says Anne Crassweller, NADbank president.
‘We refine it every year to make sure that the questions provide current information that they’ll need to plan and buy,’ Crassweller tells MiC. This year that includes information on the kinds of products and services related to technological advances and how people are using media. ‘We have a lot of online shopping questions, we have a lot of online classifieds as well as print classifieds information so that our members can see how people are changing their behaviour,’ Crassweller says.
According to the report, 19% of adults in Toronto said they spent more time with an online daily newspaper than in the previous year. A majority of those adults (63%) are male, and 48% of them are in the 18- to 34-year-old age bracket. Those who spend more time online are more likely to pick up a printed version of the newspaper as well, according to the study.
More than 1.4 million adults in Toronto said they had accessed an online social network in the previous month. Adults 18 to 24 are twice as likely to visit social sites as those who are over 25 – the study says 75% of them accessed a social network in the previous month.
Of those surveyed, 61% of online users, or more than 2.1 million adults, said they had accessed an online weather network at least once in the previous month, 76% of them are in the 18-to-49 age bracket.
Info on 27 different product categories (ranging from alcoholic beverage consumption to pleasure and business travel) and 21 different shopping categories (from automotive services and supplies to shopping malls) was collected as part of the study.
As an example of the kind of findings, Toronto is evidently not even close to being a car-free city. The study highlights state that 83%, or more than 1.6 million households in Toronto, own one or more vehicles.
