comScore: iPad owners are young and rich, Kindle owners more price-conscious

Price, brand, and apps are the three words you need to keep in mind if you are trying to sell tablets.

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So says analytics firm comScore, which just published the first set of results from TabLens, its new insights service focused on tablet users. TabLens looked at 6,000 U.S. tablet users over a three-month span to get its numbers, and while most of the results are interesting, few of them are particularly groundbreaking.

The study found, for instance, that iPad owners tend to be wealthy young males, while most Kindle Fire users are female. For most of these Kindle Fire owners, price was the primary consideration in their purchases, which, again, isn’t a surprise: At $200, the Kindle Fire is far cheaper than the $500 iPad, so price is clearly going to be a major buying factor.

iPad owners, on the other hand, were more concerned with app selection, which had the largest impact on their purchases. Second to that was the tablet’s brand, which clearly carries a lot of weight for Apple products in general.

So why did comScore put the Kindle Fire in its own category rather than under the Android umbrella? Apparently, it was trying to show off what its TabLens service can do.

“We did that to show further audience granularity for this specific analysis,” comScore marketing manager Sarah Radwanick told VentureBeat by email. “TabLens allows for filtering so clients have the ability to look at multiple cuts of data – i.e. ‘All Android tablets’, ‘Android excluding Kindle Fire’, ‘Android tablets by OEM’, etc.”

comScore says that one of the more surprising findings was that tablet users didn’t seem too concerned with having their tablets and smartphones run the same operating system. This, the company says, is good news for Microsoft, which could still see success with its Surface tablet even though Windows Phone still isn’t doing so hot.

comScore also says that TabLens data can be used by groups as diverse as advertisers, manufacturers, network operators, and publishers. The company offers a similar service, MobiLens, to track usage habits among smartphone users.

Image:  Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock 

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