There are times in every driver's life when there's just nothing to do but sit around and wait for something to happen. Railroad crossings, stoplights, drive-thru windows ... these are just some of the points where a driver can get stopped without much to do. The connected car is changing the way we view these quieter times of driving, and for Tesla owners, the connectivity extends to an in-car Web browser. But what are Tesla Model S owners doing with that connectivity? A lot of IT is going toward a smart purpose: keeping up with the news.
Quantcast, who focuses on advertising measurement and targeting, took a look at the results of browser measurement from one of the over 25,000 Model S cars on the road today. The Tesla Model S includes a 17 inch touchscreen built right into the dashboard, so the ability to surf the Web while driving is now a clear—if somewhat alarming—possibility. Quantcast turned a browser identifier on fully 100 million different sites over the course of 30 days, with a particular focus on those properties that got more than 100 page views. That brought in a hefty 463,000 page views from Tesla browsers in that time frame, and what the Tesla drivers were looking at was a particular surprise.
News was huge with the Tesla drivers. Looking at the news represented fully 54 percent of traffic, and of that percentage, 10 percent of all page views went straight to the Drudge Report. Finance news sites swung in for 13 percent of all page views, and local sites took up 26 percent of all news-related page views.
While the destinations for Tesla drivers seemed clear, so too did the times Tesla drivers put in the relevant page views. Views were almost uniform between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., with a spike starting in around six in the morning. Yet, despite this spike, there isn't the falloff that some might expect around 10 a.m.; indeed, there's a fairly relative usage pattern—granted, with some deviation—between about seven in the morning and six in the evening, leading some to wonder if Tesla owners are just “driving around all day.”
Indeed, Quantcast notes that Tesla owners “...are self-selected to have higher incomes and be early tech adopters,” so there's a certain sort of expectation there. Quantcast further describes the results as “...more reflective of Tesla owners...” and notes that “Tesla drivers have validated the value of an in-car browsing experience that goes beyond destination finding—an early indicator that the connected car is a new media platform to watch.”
That's perhaps the biggest point of the whole affair right there. Yes, the Tesla browser is quite the platform to pay attention to. On the other end of that platform is a bunch of technology early adopters with high incomes, incomes sufficient to make a Tesla a perfectly viable option. That's the kind of demographic quite a few brands would love to advertise to, and with the arrival of advertisers comes the arrival of validation of an entire platform. That's a big development, and one that advertisers would likely enjoy getting in on.
Just what will come of all this, however, is an issue only time will settle. As more Teslas hit the road, more companies will want in on the advertising. More companies may well take the Web browser to heart, and that will only open the platform up further. This could be the start of something very big, so keeping an eye on it all should pay off.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
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