Tags containing: "apps"

Can apps help publishers overcome Google Zero?

September 11, 2025 Chris M. Sutcliffe – Independent Media Reporter

SEO is a dying language. Google Zero is upon us. Media businesses are already seeing the impact of the zero clickthrough economy, where the search and ads business provides information right on the search engine results page (SERP) rather than directing users through to other sites.

Recent research has demonstrated the extent to which Google Zero is impacting traffic to publishers’ websites. Pew Research Center found that “users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits)”.

Worse still, those users are “more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary”. It is an end to curiosity. And, crucially for news publishers, it is curtailing discovery. That is especially difficult for commodity news sites, which have made advertising served to unknown audiences their priority. Those logged-out users have little incentive to click through to receive exactly the same information, but with more ads served up to them.

It is already hitting home: over 60% of Gen Z and 50% of millennials are already choosing to use AI – on platforms like ChatGPT – instead of conventional search.

Logging in

It is, at least, validation for the news and information businesses that have prioritized creating a logged-in ecosystem.

Just as Google is driving the open web with its zero clickthrough approach, the name of the game for those businesses is keeping users within their own ecosystem. External links, attrition of interest, or even just the allure of new types of content elsewhere… these all run the risk of loosening the net and having users slip out.

But those businesses are in the minority. For example, 78% of digital revenue across DCN’s members still comes from advertising. But that revenue is now under threat, as advertisers seek to shift spend to AI-powered search results.

So, media businesses are both grappling with Google Zero and seeking to retain audiences at all times. Are there any silver bullets?

Unusually for this industry, the answer this time might just be ‘yes’. To a point, at least.

The app, a regular fixture within a media business’ arsenal, might provide the solution to those issues – as long as publishers recognize how audiences use them in 2025.

Multimedia apps

As parts of the industry seek to make the logged-in economy the standard, how far along the path to primacy are news apps?

On the face of it, the initial stats look bleak. Per the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, younger audiences are increasingly unlikely to visit news sites or apps.

-Reuters Institute evaluation of news media sources, including apps- — *Source: Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025.*

These findings build upon research from the previous year’s report, which found that only 22% of news consumers in general identify news websites or apps as their main source of online news. That was down a full 10 percentage points when compared to respondents in 2018.

However, publishers have not been ignorant of that fact. Many have done their best to ameliorate that issue. They have taken note of the fact that audiences are choosing to receive news content in the form of digital video. In order to cater to that – as well as the trend towards vertical video on mobile devices – media companies, including the BBC, have chosen to include vertical video within their apps.

It is part of a wider trend towards making news apps more multimedia-oriented. The thought process is: if AI is making it harder to bring news consumers into the ecosystem, we need to cater to a wider variety of their wants once they are within. That should – in theory – prevent them from leaving.

Sarah Hartman, VP of product at The New York Times, says her team is investing in that multimedia approach: “The app also offers an optimal experience of our audio journalism. We’re increasingly leaning into multimodal UX to give our users more flexibility and control, while always meeting our high standards of craft.”

In the UK, the Observer (formerly Tortoise Media) is making a concerted effort to keep listeners to its in-app audio around once they have finished a podcast episode. Its audience growth editor for podcasts Aleena Augustine explained at the Publisher App Summit 2025 that the app has a dedicated curation team, who manually create a recommendation feed per podcast designed to lead listeners onto another piece of content, whether audio or text.

Speaking at the same event Muj Ali, group product manager of acquisition, retention and apps for the Financial Times, noted that 70% of its subscriber traffic now comes via its app.

He also stated that there is plenty of headroom to expand its content and audience strategies: “It’s the most engaged channel that we have, but also the most underutilized… but in general, it’s a place that we want to continue to grow.”

Games and growth

While news and information is the bread and butter of a media business’s activity, the need to keep audiences within the app is forcing many to branch out into other areas. Famously, the New York Times has increasingly invested in games precisely because of how “sticky” they make its app. Other titles, including the Telegraph and Guardian in the UK, have emulated that approach as well.

This shift is backed up by research from Pugpig: apps with games and multimedia more generally have a significantly higher engagement rate than those with news content alone.

-pugpug research on rich content engagement in media apps-

That has also been demonstrated outside of the hard news environment. In the UK, Stylist found that audience members who engaged with its puzzles were 68% more likely to read an article that same week.

Additionally, publishers are trying to make the content within their apps more habit-based than incidental: according to the same 2025 Pugpig Media App Report, edition-based news apps outperform their timeline-based equivalents with regards to engagement. It speaks to an opportunity app-based publishers have to zig where the always-available AI search entities zag.

Appointment-based publishing, audio and video, and games are likely to get people to stick around once they are within the app. With AI-powered search, however, the task of getting audiences into a news publishers’ ecosystem remains a difficult one.

Hartman states that, as with all of the NYT’s products, the best use of its app is to highlight the strong journalistic work its team produces: “We’ll likely need to evolve our interfaces to meet changing user expectations around personalization, adaptability, and brevity. But we also believe that the fundamental purpose of our app, providing a direct connection to our journalism served in the best possible way, will continue to be a valuable proposition.”

For news publishers with strong brands and reputations, it might well be possible to stem the tide of Google Zero.

Audiences are becoming more aware of AI-search’s limitations, and publishers can provide context beyond a SERP snippet. Provided those media businesses have invested in making their apps sticky. For, once audiences have landed, the humble app may indeed be a solution to this new problem.

6 verticals in 1 app: inside New York Magazine’s new app strategy

January 16, 2025 Esther Kezia Thorpe – Media Reporter

Apps are hot again. After the boom in investment in interactive publisher apps in the early 2010s failed to produce much in terms of audience growth or return on investment, many publishers quietly closed their apps, turning instead to putting content on social platforms and relying on responsive design for the mobile experience. But app strategy for media brands is shifting.

As the cost of producing apps comes down, coupled with the intense competition for attention on platforms, publishers are reconsidering their app-approach.

The intent is different this time, however. Rather than being a vehicle to drive discovery, publishers like the FT with lightweight offering FT Edit, the New York Times’ subscription-only NYT Audio app, and even start-ups like the Baltimore Banner are using their own apps to build deeper relationships with superfans.

New York Magazine is the latest publisher to take another look at apps. They previously launched one in 2013; a replica of the print magazine with interactive features, which was shut down a few years later.

Last month, they announced the launch of a new flagship mobile app. Notably, it includes all six of New York Magazine’s verticals as well: Intelligencer, The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street.

So what made an app an attractive proposition this time around, and what are their primary aims with it? “Over 70% of our readers read on mobile,” Priyanka Arya, SVP of consumer revenue at Vox Media said. “Mobile is the primary point of entry, and the primary reading experience for our subscribers and readers. So we wanted to create the best reading experience for those users.”

Arya also said that an app was one of the top features requested by subscribers, both through solicited and unsolicited feedback. As a result, the team decided to look at creating a mobile-first experience that would first and foremost serve subscribers.

Strategy: One app, six titles

The decision to have all six verticals within one app may seem unusual, but it reflects the subscription setup of New York Magazine. Rather than offer standalone subscriptions to each vertical, readers who wish to access Vulture or Curbed instead pay for a New York Magazine subscription which gets them access across all verticals.

Arya emphasized that having the verticals and the appropriate branding was important rather than pooling articles across the portfolio by topic, for example.

“We see very different behavior across our audience,” Arya said, explaining why they offered them all in one app. “There’s folks who really go deep into one vertical, there are folks who enjoy multiple and go across our portfolio, and we wanted to create an experience that served both users as well as enhanced discovery for those who may only be single-vertical readers.”

When users enter the app, there are a variety of different experiences they can have. If they’re very focused on one vertical, they can set it as their homepage and tailor the experience. But Arya said that they make an active effort to encourage people to read across the brands with toggle options for quick takes, deep divers and long reads. “We see folks who do read across verticals are among the highest engaged and highest retained,” she noted.

The app therefore also serves as a discovery vehicle for these other brands. Readers may have different levels of familiarity with other verticals when they subscribe. “We see through our newsletter efforts that there may be loyal Vulture readers or The Cut readers who are just going to those home pages, so they’re not experiencing everything that we’re putting in print or we’re putting in some of our other verticals,” Arya pointed out. “But they tend to really enjoy it when they do find [others].”

A premium reading experience

Rather than a bells-and-whistles experience, app users these days seek clean, fast-loading reading. But publishers still have to develop a strategy that differentiates their app experience from web browsing to encourage downloads.

The New York Magazine app has built in a number of features to offer a premium experience. As noted above, there are convenient toggles between brands, and the ability to set a homepage while easily navigating to other sites. The app also offers personalized notifications so readers can get alerts for what they most care about, and a better ad experience than on browser.

Perhaps the most compelling proposition of the app is curation. The app includes a ‘Great Stories’ section that pulls together a curation of timely stories and the best pieces from across the portfolio, selected by editors.

“Our feature stories that run in our print magazine and across the portfolio online are among our most popular no matter what interests you may have or vertical affinity you may have,” Arya explained. “That is a place that doesn’t exist on web that can really help you navigate through some of our best pieces and read what our editors are recommending.”

Helping users find the best stories without the help of algorithms is an increasingly appealing prospect. Because personalization was available for push notifications, the team were keen to have somewhere to showcase the best of their editorial across brands, with human curation.

A long-term play

For many publishers, return on investment (ROI) can be a stumbling point for apps. Although they’re cheaper than ever, they do still require upfront investment, often without the promise of short-term, or even medium-term returns.

For Arya, the app is a long-term investment. “What we’re hoping is by getting as many subscribers as we can to download and use the app, we can increase engagement and therefore retention,” she explained. “There’s a pretty lucrative argument around retention, which is always a longer term play, but a much more sustainable play.”

“Our top 20% engaged subscribers have a 30 to 40% higher retention rate than our average subscriber. That’s substantial. So our goal is to continue to move more people into higher engaged tiers.”

Retention increases are far from an overnight task. But a better retention outcome translates to a solid – and more sustainable – revenue outcome in the long term.

Although the New York Magazine app is primarily a retention play, Vox has a strategy for encouraging non-subscribers to download the app with the goal of converting them later. Users have to create an account up-front. Then they get a number of free articles before hitting the subscriber wall, similar to the web experience.

“We built the app with our subscribers in mind; a lot of the feature development was looking at those reader habits and building for them,” said Arya. “But we are encouraging readers who aren’t subscribers to download the app, and we do have a strategy to engage them within the app and ideally convert them.”

Promising early results

At the time of writing, the New York Magazine app is in the top #10 of the Magazines and Newspapers section of the app store. It also has very good ratings and feedback, and requests are already coming in from subscribers for features such as saving and favoriting articles. An Android version of the app is also in the works.

Crucially, Arya sees it as more important than ever that publishers focus on their own properties. “With algorithms changing and platforms constantly changing, betting on your direct traffic and your loyal audience is something that’s been really important to us, and I think should be for other publishers,” she emphasized.

Innovation | Perspectives

How to master app store optimization by thinking locally and globally

February 27, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Think of it like products in a supermarket. Content companies with mobile apps are locked in a fight for two incredibly scarce resources: consumer attention and shelf space. Unfortunately, on the digital shelves of the app store, discovery is the bottleneck. Consumers can’t download apps they don’t know exist in the first place. (And how can they in a market where the number of apps submitted to the Apple App Store in the month of January alone topped 500 submissions daily?)

To rise above the noise, and drive app installs in the process, app owners compete for a top-notch spot in search results. Smart companies are winning the battle with App Store Optimization (ASO) by tweaking keywords, icons and other assets to make sure their app store landing converts. It takes dedication and budget to get ASO right, which is why companies that succeed and boost downloads in one country or store are leaving money on the table if they don’t publish their apps in more places.

But before you go global with your app, double-check that you have mastered more than the ASO basics. The checklist is much longer than it was just a year ago because ASO has evolved, expanding beyond the app store presence and deeper into the funnel. Looking back, the first wave of ASO was a lot like the early days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Companies could score quick wins by hacking Google algorithms or focusing on “long tail” keywords. Moving forward targeting “killer” keywords is not enough. ASO is morphing into what I call AMO (App Marketing Optimization) and ready for a rethink.

Rethinking ASO

ASO/AMO tops the agenda at every stage of the app lifecycle. But it’s never a case of set-it-and-forget-it. It requires app owners to monitor and manage a laundry list of elements that starts with keywords and ends with compelling video clips. It’s an ongoing effort, but the pay-off is massive organic growth that every app owner can afford to tap for their app. The key is to take the right steps in the right order.

It all starts with testing, refreshing and optimizing all of the moving parts of your app (titles, descriptions, icons, screenshots, videos, and reviews) on a regular basis. Once you have the processes in place to achieve positive results for your app at home, it’s time to take your app abroad.

Mobile Games companies need little convincing. They were pioneers in aligning app elements, visuals and gameplay with the preferences of a global audience. Consider Candy Crush, a blockbuster app with audiences in nearly 200 countries thanks to a look-and-feel that is a match with local tastes and trends. Now other categories of apps, notably those in the Entertainment category, are following a similar blueprint to attract and acquire more users.

Localization differs from internationalization

But before you embark on a strategy to take your app global, know the difference between localization and internationalization. Think of internationalization as table stakes. It encompasses what you need to adapt your app to different languages, regions and cultures to reach a global market. Your focus in this stage is on the basics: changing time, dates, region format, and other aspects of your app to fit with your target markets and audience.

Localization goes deeper. It starts with translating the language of the app and other elements (keywords, description, and even the name of the app) to be a tight fit with your target audience. If you plan to engage in commerce, be sure to adapt your app to local regulations and payment methods to avoid any legal battles further down the line.

Clearly, localization is not a job you want to leave to Google translator. Amateur efforts rarely pay dividends, and literal translations can do your app brand more harm than good. (Case in point: KFC’s famous finger lickin’ good motto for its fried chicken is a notable example of a bad translation. In Chinese, it urged consumers to bite their fingers off.) It’s also important to resist the temptation to localize every aspect of your app from the get-go just because you can. It pays to pace yourself.

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, or the countries to target, then start with your app name and keywords and localize these assets for popular countries or languages. As a rule, use your organic app installs as a guide. Pinpointing countries where your app is taking off allows you to prioritize your efforts, starting with keywords. Use tools to check traffic volume for specific keywords and bake the best (yet most relevant) keywords into your app assets. If you see a bump up in your app downloads, then take it as a sure sign you can move on to localize other assets, such as the app description, followed by other marketing collateral including screenshots.

Cater to local cultures

From here on, industry literature tells us localization is just a matter of “wash, rinse, repeat” for every additional country or app store on your list. But is it really that simple? In a word: no.

An effective strategy to go global with your content goes beyond the pure “science” of ASO/AMO to the “art” of understanding how addressing individual cultural preferences and nuances. Pay close attention to other aspects of your app—such as colors, images and user interface—to build a loyal audience for your content.

Do your homework and use common sense.

Primary design considerations:

UI: Does your audience read left to right or right to left? Or is it vertical? Make sure you factor in how the text and images are read. And make doubly sure the use of directional icons in your app are logical and genuinely helpful. It impacts engagement and dictates how users will interact with their device, especially as they swipe left—or right—depending on the app and activity.

IMAGES & CONTENT: Brush up on ethnology (or hire someone with those skills). Adapt the ethnicity of your visual elements to local culture and pay special attention to skin, hair, and eye color. It’s a no-brainer that Asians or Indians might be wary of buying into localized content that displays blonde-haired, blue-eyed models, presenters, or families. Rethink the obvious icons and idioms. Sure, using a piggy bank icon as a metaphor for saving money works well in North America and much of Europe, but it’s a miss in most Middle Eastern countries.

COLOR: First impressions count, and different colors resonate with different cultures. For example, Japanese players like subtlety and pale, softer colors and shades. Chinese users, on the other hand, prefer vivid, strong and bright colors like red and orange. The mobile games industry learned this the hard way, so deep-dive into posts and publications (such as Pocketgamer.biz) where they share their tips and tricks.

From images to music, be prepared to adapt every aspect of your app to match your target markets.

Pay attention to the political spectrum

Done properly, localization engages your audience with content that resonates because it respects their local customs and cultures, not just language. Significantly, the same rules apply to your choice in app marketing and advertising messages and ad creatives. Sure, it’s a must when you take your app global. But the surprise success of SmartNews, the news app that delivers the top trending stories downloaded by over 25 million readers in over 100 countries, suggests the same approach can boost results and user loyalty in your home market as well.

In the case of SmartNews, it started with the realization that readers in North America were divided by political parties but united around one goal: the desire to access to real news, not fake news. “The most effective way to show we understood our audience and their concerns was to adapt our marketing to appeal to all sides,” Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Head of Global Growth at SmartNews, told me in a recent podcast interview.

SmartNews bet on a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message that would appeal to a broad political spectrum of users.

A review of app data and demographics revealed that the SmartNews audience was a mirror of American society. “Our readers are mostly between the ages of 35-65, and they range from liberal to moderate conservative in their politics,” Nicolas explained. An effective campaign would have to be objective and emotive. Nicolas, recently named a Mobile Hero for his user acquisition approach and accomplishments, went to work and immediately rejected flashy images and trendy buzzwords. Instead, he worked with his team to develop a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message.

The approach worked, boosting usage and earning the app positive reviews. Nicolas says the results are still coming in and a focus group will provide the inside track on audience and brand impact. In the meantime, internal data shows the focus on eliminating the filter bubble has allowed SmartNews to increase app appeal to both genders at all levels of society and across the complete political spectrum.

You’ve invested time and resource to make your app a hit at home, and it makes business sense to take your app to global in order to maximize exposure. Yes, that starts off with mastering the fundamentals of global and local design considerations to adapt your app to your audience. But we all know that designing a terrific app is not enough given the glut of products in the market and the increasing consumer requirement for apps that are aligned with local tastes and trends. Discovery is a critical component of conversion, but apps have to strike a chord. Moving from simple App Store Optimization to an effective global app marketing strategy will help you maximize your investment so that your app will be popular with audiences everywhere.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research

Learning to please the love ‘em and leave ‘em millennial crowd

September 11, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Millennials – the ‘distracted demographic’ between the ages of 18 and 34 were weaned on the Internet and spoiled by content choice. They have grown up to become the largest generation in the U.S. with a wallet to match. If you think it’s a lucrative audience ripe for the taking, think again.

Tapping the significant opportunities and tackling the even greater challenges around influencing this massive audience requires a deep understanding of digital content consumption trends and how their evolving media habits make them different from the rest of the population.

This is where Millennials on Millennials, the research program and research report series from global performance management company Nielsen is breaking new ground to offer critical insight into topics that impact Millennials and the media industry as a whole. The inaugural report and the second in the series, released in August by Nielsen’s own Millennial associates, leverage Nielsen audience datasets to shed important light on the “why’s” behind key engagement trends and highlight the ways brands, marketers and content companies can seek connect with this highly coveted demographic.

While the first in the series uncovered hard truths about Millennials (they are glued to their smartphone, they are distracted by multitasking and they are bothered by advertising -unless it is a precursor to accessing free content), the second volume of research reveals hard numbers around their digital media and social media usage.

It’s no secret that Millennials are engaged with digital content during all waking hours of the day and keep their devices close by – and turned on – when they sleep. In fact, Millennials are glued to their smartphones (1,179 minutes each in Q4 2016 on their devices compared to 659 minutes for those aged 35-49).

Socializing

Top of the list, and leading by a massive margin, is communication via social media platforms and apps. Unsurprisingly, these platforms have grown up with Millennials and are now an integral part of the daily routine. While social communication use has plateaued at an extremely high level, growth is getting a boost from Millennials that have broadened the number of services and apps they use. Specifically, 70% of Millennials report using two or more apps for messaging. Notably, Millennials are also 8% more likely than users 35 and older to use messaging apps for group conversations.

Listen Up

Millennials aren’t just connecting in more ways; they are consuming more content across more platforms. Digital music consumption, a topic examined in the report, is witnessing the most significant – and surprising shift.

You would imagine that digital consumption via Internet and apps is reducing Millennials’ appetite for traditional radio tune-in. However, Nielsen has found the opposite is true. The research pegs weekly reach of broadcast radio among Millennials at a whopping 93%. At the same time on-demand streaming is going strong. More than half (60%) of Millennials say they use two or more apps to stream music.

Interestingly, podcasts are also winning over Millennial audiences and a growing share of their attention. Nielsen reports 37% of Millennials listen to podcasts at least once a week, while 13% say they listen every day, compared with 5% of consumers 35 and older who tune in on a regular basis. (Little wonder media companies, including the Washington Post, are scrambling to turn readers into listeners with the help of compelling podcasts that mash up news, analysis and celebrity.)

Engagement and the evolution of audience to advocates

July 11, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Digital media is waking up to the hard truth that more is not always better. As a result, the strong belief that a high volume of content attracts a high number of page views is being replaced by the stark realization that quality trumps everything – even traffic.

NBC News is just the latest in a string of publishers to shift their focus from pushing pageviews to encouraging audience engagement. The emphasis on quality over quantity is part of a larger strategy to avoid commoditization by ensuring differentiation.

Rather than produce more news content, NBC News produces more original content around the news in the form of analysis, narrative, and additional formats including podcast and video. The outcome is less volume – approximately 25% fewer stories a day. However the goal is to deliver more value as this is a take on the news the audience can only get from NBC News. In an interview with Digiday, Nick Ascheim, SVP of Digital at NBC News, recounts the massive “culture shift” that has taken place in the newsroom. In the past, he says, the company was focused on pageviews. “The approach now is, let’s worry a little less about how many clicks and more about telling a good story.”

But it’s not enough to adopt a new mindset; companies must also adjust internal KPIs to measure success and gauge failure. Undeterred by the lack of industry standards or metrics to quantity engagement, NBC News has developed its own, unique formula. It defines a loyal user as one who has visited the site five or more times in two consecutive months. Of course, the way a publisher chooses to define and measure engagement will depend on key variables such as content category, delivery format, audience demographics and, above all, company objectives.

Engagement from the Start

The efforts of publishers like NBC News to set new performance goals and take on the task of internalizing them is a huge step in the right direction. (NBC News has even gone so far as to print the new goals on cards it distributes to writers and employees.) But publishers would also do well to apply the same rigor to how they acquire and engage audiences in the first place.

An obvious place to start is mobile apps, where app companies are learning the hard way that strategies focused on attracting massive numbers of users are fatally flawed. In the early days, the App Economy was a numbers game where data-driven (in my view data-obsessed) approaches worked well. Companies pursued strategies that allowed them to buy app installs at low prices in the belief that it would pay off. It seemed to work, allowing some apps – particularly games and lifestyle apps – to rocket up the app store charts.

But the gold rush mood sobered when a flurry of reports and blogs made the headlines arguing that app installs, like mayflies, were literally here today and gone tomorrow. Data released by app analytics and attribution companies, highlighted “insane” app unistall rates, adding gasoline to the fire.

The Mother of all Metrics

Today the companies across all app categories and geographies are coming to terms with the realization that engagement is what I like to call “the mother of all metrics.” Indeed, engagement isn’t just the end-game. It matters at every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Finding ways to grow (and measure) engagement is the toughest task that confronts every company with digital assets, not just apps.

Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from app managers as they rethink and retool to identify, acquire, engage, and retain high-quality users from the get-go. Their journey started a few years back with a singular focus on driving traffic. (Sound familiar?) They relied heavily on ASO (App Store Optimization). But their toolbox of capabilities has since expanded and evolved to include direct marketing, social media, influencer outreach, above the line advertising and marketing, and everything in between. All in an effort to forge deeper connections with fewer users.

By way of background, ASO is similar to SEO. Only instead of publishers optimizing elements of their content and websites in an effort to show up high in search engine results, publishers optimize key elements of their app store landing page and presence – such as keywords, icons and videos – to ensure people discover and download their app. That may deliver a high quantity of users, but the success is fleeting if efforts fail to drive lasting loyalty and frequent use of the apps.

Quality Rules

Indeed, ASO has a role to play at every step of the journey. This inclues production, presence, promotion and the pragmatism app developers and companies will need to build a business, not just release an app. For savvy app marketers, ASO has evolved into an approach that encompasses everything neccessary to deliver great content and great experiences via an app. That is what’s required to move the needle on audience engagement and take an app from being simply discoverable to truly engaging. This ensures that the app goes from being a one-time download to a longterm addiction.

For publishers, winning used to be about creating huge volumes of content. For app makers, winning was about buying huge volumes of users. In both businesses the rules have changed, making way for a renewed focus on quality.

In all areas of your business, quality trumps everything. And engagement is emerging the performance metric that matters across the every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Whether you want to attract an audience or grow revenues, quality matters. Strategies aimed at boosting page views or installs may deliver fast — but not sustainable — growth. To achieve that, companies must double-down on efforts to create content and experiences that are genuinely engaging, thus converting an audience of readers into a legion of advocates for the long-term.

Audiences | Industry-Research

Understanding the impact of mobile multitasking

March 22, 2017 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

The mobile device is the command center for the hyper-connected consumer. Increasingly, it provides the point of access to the Internet of Things (loT). Today’s publishers and brands need to understand cross-device usage and identify the best pathway to attract and engage the hyper-connected consumer. In order to identify the appropriate channels and marketing opportunities, Verto Analytics analyzed cross-device usage in their research report, “Multitasking and Mobile Apps: New Ways to Measure Consumer Behavior.”

It’s no surprise that mobile device usage is on the rise. On average, American adults own five devices, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, and wearables. In Q4 2016, PC usage totaled an average of 104 minutes per day. That’s slightly less than consumer’s total mobile device usage, which averaged 75 minutes per day on smartphones and 39 minutes per day on tablets (totaling 114 minutes per day).

Mobile apps also drive usage and far exceed mobile web usage. In fact, consumers spent 6.9 billion hours on mobile apps compared to 1.2 billion hours of mobile web usage in December 2016.

Mobile App Usage

Overall, consumers have an average of 89 apps installed on their smartphones and use approximately 25 each week and only eight per day. Fewer than 10% of all apps installed on a smartphone are used daily.

Device sessions:

56% of all device sessions are still single-app sessions.
19% show at least three distinct apps being used in a single session.
9% show at least four distinct apps being used in a single session.
5 to 4% of all smartphone sessions are multitasking sessions.

Multitasking Sessions

Verto Analytics defines a multitasking session as using at least four different apps and at least seven differ shifts (movement from app to app).

Consumers are using multiple apps to engage with the external world. External environment apps allow consumers to interact with their environments. This category of apps includes fitness tracking apps, connected home and personal assistant apps, and streaming media apps combined with hardware.

Personal assistant apps (i.e. Amazon’s Alexa) currently make up only 4% of all usage. Verto Analytics predicts these apps will increasingly be incorporated into consumer’s multitasking behavior.

As one would imagine, social media services and messaging apps (such as Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and WhatsApp) are most likely to be a part of a consumer’s multitasking behavior.

Multitasking Likelihood

Interestingly, the report found that the list of apps with the highest total number of returns does not necessarily correlate with the list of apps with the highest return rates (total number of people returning to the same app). The return rate is an important metric. It’s the ratio of multitasking sessions when a given app experiences a return against the total number of sessions of that app within a given time frame.

For example, if a consumer uses the Waze app once a day every day for a month (30 days) and on five of the those occasions, there is multitasking session (the consumer leaves and returns to Waze during the same session), the return rate for Waze is 18% (5/30). Waze, in this instance, had an 18% tendency to attract consumers back to the app during a multitasking session. What we learn from this is that the plays a central-role in a consumer’s session because it is actively used with other apps. Learning about how consumers actively use apps with other apps, often referred to as a smart hub, plays a key role in chart the consumer pathways to best target for frequent interaction and engagement.

Understanding multitasking, the best rate of return, and smart hubs offers insight into important mobile touchpoints. Brands and publishers need to identify and understand these points of interaction and their relationships to drive usage grown, engagement and monetization.

Industry-Research

App marketing shifts from installs to engagement

March 6, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

More apps mean more competition for users. This dynamic is driving user acquisition costs into the stratosphere. Companies have a choice: They can pay higher prices to acquire app users, or they can invest more effort in retaining high-value customers. Reams of recent research reveal a seismic shift to the latter as more app marketers sharpen their focus on approaches that emphasize “quality over quantity.”

It’s all about keeping users loyal. App marketers are beginning to understand that the customer-centric rules of online, digital and physical marketing also apply in the App Economy. For example, online a single-digit increase in retention can mean a double- or even triple-digit increase in profits. When it comes to marketing and monetizing apps, the advantages of identifying and inspiring quality users can be just as massive.

App Engagement

AppsFlyer is a platform for mobile attribution and marketing analytics whose tracking technology is found on 98% of the world’s mobile devices. The company regularly undertakes research to analyze best practices and trends. The State Of App Engagement, AppsFlyer’s most comprehensive and ambitious report to date, draws on billions of data points across the second half of 2016 to help app marketers identify quality users who will engage with their app over time.

The report offers marketers a breakdown of key engagement benchmarks by platform, category and region:

Retention rates
Average sessions per daily active user
Cross-funnel conversion rates
Lifetime engagement

The report focuses on Shopping, Games and Travel apps. However, the overarching observations and trends offer valuable guidance to all app marketers as they seek to optimize their campaigns and target audiences highly likely to engage with their apps over time.

The research confirms that app retention is an elusive goal to reach (findings show only 10-12% of users remain active 7 days after downloading an app, and only 4-5% are still active after 30 days). Yet it also points to positive results that show marketers using data to drive results. Based on a year-over-year comparison the report shows how overall retention has improved in some regions and across some app categories. “The good news for marketers is that retention has mostly improved – especially among non-organic users on both platforms,” observes report author Shani Rosenfelder.

Organic traffic – that is, people who download your app without you having to invest in paid or social promotion to get their attention – is great to have but not the way to drive serious growth. In a marketplace brimming with apps, and where app store search is fatally flawed, marketers can’t rely on WOM to take their app from good to great. For that they need to target non-organic traffic. To do so, they must harness data that will allow them to target audiences that promise high engagement and low wastage of their ad spend.

Among the findings:

Small gap, big opportunities: Average sessions, the number of times a daily active user will engage with your app, used to be vastly different between organic and non-organic users. However, the gap between these two groups of users across platforms is closing fast. Globally, Android organic users come in at 3.81 sessions compared with 3.56 sessions for non-organic users on the platform. That’s a mere 7% difference. On iOS, the gap is slightly wider with organic users outperforming non-organic users by 9%. The report reads this to mean there is “substantial quality to be found among non-organic users.”

Retention rates rocket: When it comes to retention North America has the best Android score across all regions. For organic users the breakdown is 35.8% for Day 1 Retention and 4.1% for Day 30 Retention. Retention rates among non-organic users on Android is 27.3% for Day 1 and 3.5% for Day 30. On iOS retention rates for organic users comes in at 30.6% for Day 1 (26.3% for non-organic users) and 5.1% for Day 30 (3.1% for non-organic users). The report also lists the cities across the U.S. where marketers are highly likely to find high-quality users for their app.

Significantly, some of the less prominent media markets have the highest mobile app engagement rates in the country, according to AppsFlyer.

Engagement is encouraging: Overall, organic users of Shopping apps on Android engage in 41.94 content views (for the period studied). Non-organic users engaged in 26.14 content views. (In the case of iOS the content views are 29.46 for organics and 12.14 for non-organics.) Draw a completely plausible parallel between Content Views for shoppers and “News Views” for consumers, and the report gives app marketers at content and media companies good reason to be positive about the results they can achieve. One audience looks at products, the other looks at articles. In both cases, more views mean more chances to engage and retain (or monetize) your audience.

User acquisition campaigns that focus on driving installs are passé. The next wave of activity and excitement is all about finding ways to identify audiences that will interact with your app repeatedly. Marketers need to approach this challenge armed with the critical data they need to optimize their investments. It is essential to understand the key characteristics that separate loyal and quality users from everyone else and target non-organic users who measure up to their organic traffic.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research

Why mobile apps are important to a publisher’s digital strategy

September 14, 2016 DCN

Mobile usage now represents almost two out of every three digital media minutes as we continue to see more and more consumer usage shift from desktop to mobile. In all, time spent in digital media grew 53% over the past three years, attributed to the surge in usage of mobile apps (+111%) and of mobile web (+62%) reports comScore’s newly released 2016 U.S. Mobile App Report.

Interestingly, the smartphone app is the biggest driver of digital media engagement, resulting in an 80% increase in mobile’s share of time spent over the past three years. However, while the mobile app audience spends more time on apps, comparing users of Top 1000 Apps vs. users of Top 1000 Mobile Web Properties, the mobile web audience is almost three times bigger than the app audience. Intriguingly, almost half of all smartphone users do not download any apps. Among the half of smartphone users that do download apps, they average 3.5 downloads per person per month. Industry experts forecast that by 2017, there will be 268 billion apps downloaded.

It’s difficult to build to build a mobile app audience. However, once the app users are engaged, they are an extremely loyal audience. To illustrate this point, app users spend more than three hours per month on the Top 1000 apps on average whereas mobile web visitors spend less than 10 minutes per month on the Top 1000 web properties. Males 18-44 tend to be the heavy app downloaders with approximately 5 new apps each month.

While all demographics are using their smartphones apps more now, persons 55-64 registered the greatest year-over-year increase at 37%. Further, all U.S. consumers, especially persons 18-24, spend the largest share of their web time on smartphone apps except for adults 65-plus, where screen size mostly likely acts as an inhibitor. In contrast, tablet app usage is down across all demographics.

Facebook and Google are a strong hold in the app marketplace; 7 of the Top 25 apps, based on unique visitors, are owned by these two companies. Of the Top 25 apps, the three leading categories, based on unique visitors, are Utilities (9), Social (6) and Entertainment (6 – tied). Facebook, the largest social platform accounts for 76% of all time spent on social apps. App position on smartphone correlates to usage. Not surprisingly, apps with easy access on the home screen showed strong audience reach. Smartphone users spend approximately 45% of their app time on their #1 most used app, and about 73% on of that time of their Top 3 apps.

Mobile devices are consumers’ constant companions. It’s where audiences are spending most of their time online. Since mobile users are spending more time on their apps, it’s important for digital publishers to continue to develop a platform strategy to attract and transition their large web audiences to loyal app users. Further, as the app market continues to expand “smart” device utilization (think loT like exercise trackers, home and car alarm systems, etc.) expands, it will only become more difficult to break through to the consumer’s screen.

Innovation

Purch’s strategy to make complex buying decisions easy and actionable

April 19, 2016 Lisa Sealey, SVP Marketing – DCN

Our increasing expectation that mobile can deliver personal and relevant information, assistance and advice every step of the daily journey paves the way for exciting and innovative approaches that combine content and marketing to suit individual context, preference and ‘need-state’. Eager to take advantage of new opportunities at the intersection of content and commerce, Purch, which operates Web sites such as Top Ten Reviews and Tom’s Guide, is pursuing a bold strategy to make complex buying decisions easy and actionable for ‘mobile-first’ consumers.

The acquisition of ShopSavvy, one of the largest mobile shopping apps (available on iOS and Android) with more than one million active monthly users and 30 million downloads to date, is the latest move in Purch’s wider push to equip consumers with information as they seek to research, find and buy the products that are best for them. Peggy Anne Salz — mobile analyst, nine-time author and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove — catches up with Phil Barrett, senior VP at Purch, to discuss how publishers can tap mobile to make the most of their assets, grow their audience and — ultimately — bridge the digital realm and the physical world.

Purch focuses on what it calls ‘service-oriented publishing’, first buying titles and websites for the content, and now acquiring ActiveJunky, Consumr and most recently ShopSavvy for the mobile capabilities and apps to deliver content and price comparisons in the ‘mobile moment’. Based on your experience how should publishers use content to drive commerce effectively — and why does it seem that so many publishers have got it so wrong?

A lot of publishers got it wrong because they started out just looking for ways to do the same thing, but on a smaller screen. They have failed on mobile because they have tried to provide a smaller, bite-size version of what people can already get on other screens — PCs, TV and online. People move around in the real world and in the funnel, and this changes the context of where and how consumers want to get to information. At Purch we’re about helping people as they make complex buying decisions, so we have focused our efforts on building high-utility, single-purpose mobile apps that assist consumers in key activities at key points in the journey. Our customers want to find out something, or they validate what someone just told them or shared with them. Further on in the journey they also want to be sure they are getting the best price when they are standing in the shop and before they make the decision to buy.

Our apps and the experience they offer users fit together to map this journey. There are apps like Consumr, now PurchX, that enable an ‘upper funnel’ type of experience, allowing users to explore products and get information, without an emphasis on commerce. In this app it’s all about user reviews. We’re not pushing a sale; we are basically pushing value by enabling people to connect with each other and get what they need. Our ShopSavvy app, on the other hand, is about commerce. We say it’s ‘pocket to price in 10 seconds’ or ‘all the sales in one place.’ So the consumer journey starts with knowing what you want and getting that information, once that has been validated through reviews and other information, it moves on to making sure you are getting the best price — and that could be a local price, a retail price, or an online price and can include coupons, discount codes or special offers. Some publishers with mobile apps have made the decision to build mega-apps that will be all things to all people, but that is not useful or valuable in a mobile context. The best apps do one thing really well.

But success in mobile is not just about being able to build and map apps to the user journey. It’s about encouraging users to use the app — and frequently. How do you achieve this?

I think it’s a really good point — and brings me to something else that we haven’t really seen in the publishing space: the idea of emphasizing lifetime value versus RPV. Publishers I talk to are focused on questions like ‘what is my page yield?’ and ‘what is my RPV or RPU?’ At Purch we frame this differently. In our view, if we can offer value at all points of the customer journey, then they’re far more likely to sign up for our membership program, which is the first step to encouraging and deepening customer engagement to build loyalty.

It starts with the consumer giving me an email address via the app, or it could also be a Facebook login on the website — and what we are able to build is a loyalty platform that both recognizes and rewards our best users. The idea is to recognize users for their engagement — and that could be because they’re active in our Tom’s Hardware forums or rating reviews on PurchX. We’re also incorporating the cashback engine that we acquired from ActiveJunky last year to offer it back to our users so they will be incentivized to come back to us.

It goes back to providing the value I talked about. We are helping users make buying decisions, and we are supporting them throughout the funnel. And now, since we can surface best price or best deal by not only searching for who has the best deal but then offering cashback on top of that, we have a really strong value proposition, a reward program and a reason for consumers to come back to our app often.

Of course, your user experience and rewards will need to be in sync with your audience segments…

Yes. Different audiences respond to different things. For example, our Tech Enthusiast audience is actually motivated more by recognition than rewards, so we are making sure we have the right badging system and the right leader board system. Treating them as our MVPs will encourage them to become advocates for our brand, our service and the value that we offer. As a company we are focusing a lot of our energy on acquiring more members, and that is going to drive our strategy and activities over the next 15 months.

Your family of apps maps to the user journey, but it also attempts to connect the physical and digital worlds to enable real-life commerce. What is the lesson here for publishers seeking to bridge this gap?

Our approach has been to offer valuable content so that consumers sign up for more as part of our program. This allows me to connect with you and say: ‘Hey Peggy, it’s great that you signed up for the program. Did you know that your user ID and password also works on the following apps?’ But it’s not just about encouraging you to use the other apps; it’s also about being able to recognize where you started your journey and surface content, sales deals or whatever based on your profile. Knowing that you came in through Tom’s Hardware means I can make sure your experience — and your context — can be enhanced and extended across the different platforms.

It’s all about solving one of the biggest problems publishers have today: visitor stitching. Giving the consumer value that motivates them to register and then use their same ID across our ecosystem, provides us insights into how user behavior changes from device to device or channel to channel — and that allows us to get a lot smarter about how we interact with users or shape what we offer them as a service. Today most publishers struggle with this because a user that starts on a desktop and then moves to a mobile device will look to them like two different users.

What steps should publishers take to deliver an ideal mobile experience — and what should they avoid?

Publishers have to deliver an experience that is low friction and high value. Adapting this for the mobile channel and context means you can’t have a slow loading mobile website or a complex app that takes forever to figure out. Everything has to be intuitive because the context on mobile is different from desktop. It’s critical to focus on delivering the best experience possible, that means putting the user first and demonstrating that you have unique content or unique service your audience can’t get elsewhere.

Demonstrating that value also demands companies communicate effectively and appropriately with consumers. In an age where one-to-many marketing is old-school and conversational content and marketing dictates that communications via the mobile channel should resemble a dialog, not a hard-sell, which channels and approaches do you recommend to publishers — and which have worked best for you?

All touch points are important. But it’s not just about making sure your audience can read the article or review on their smartphone and tablet. It’s also important to have a robust email program and one that isn’t ‘spray and pray’. Publishers have the opportunity to fine-tune the messaging and really personalize the message. This is really low-hanging fruit since email is also one of the cheapest and most effective forms of remarketing. I would advise publishers to make sure their email program is robust and then I would recommend they look to partner with other platforms to extend the reach of their content.

Another important channel for publishers, and where we are also focused, is mobile notifications because they enable companies to deliver a just-in-time message at the right moment and in the right context. For us that means we can send a message that says ‘Hey, the price of that product you were reading about or searching for just dropped’. It’s communication that can get people engaged and further validate the value of your service.

Finally, publishers should make sure all of their touch points are connected and aligned to the same strategy, as opposed to having a separate email team or a separate mobile notification team. Instead, they should make sure capabilities are aligned to give the consumer the choice and the opportunity to select frequency and channels.

On the topic of channels and formats, are there any that have done better than you had expected?

I have been blown away by the success of our QR code scanning app. It was a surprise because QR codes had a pretty bad reputation because marketers kind of ruined it in the very early days with campaigns that just took people to a mobile website or a mobile version of the ad. Being a marketer myself and being one of the early marketers trying to leverage QR codes in the early 2000s I also wrote them off as being dead in North America, but we are seeing huge interest among consumers — and we’re counting 5,000 plus downloads a day, just on the QR code reader. And that is just iOS since we don’t yet have an Android version.

You have created a platform that spans channels and cultivated an app ecosystem that serves partner brands. What are your plans and do you envision opening this up to other publishers?

We are focused on offering this to our core brands first, and will begin rolling it out to them this summer. We have had publishers express some interest, saying it would be amazing since they don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or the resources to build their own app ecosystem, or their own loyalty program, or their own virtual product database. In our own product database we have about 100 million products with 5 years of pricing history which is very unique in the industry. So, our strategy is to offer this to premier partners first and then potentially we could offering this as a platform that other publishers and companies can licence or tap into down the road.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Perspectives

How the industry can help mobile developers survive “Apptropolis”

March 28, 2016 DCN

As of early 2016, millions of apps are ready for download on Google Play, Apple’s App Store, Amazon, Microsoft, and Blackberry World. Elsewhere in the world, China’s Wandoujia app store adds a stunning average of 500,000 new users per day to its platform.

Welcome to a form of digital sprawl I call “Apptropolis.” While it’s not a city made of brick and mortar, Apptropolis has plenty in common with the boomtown megalopolises dotting our planet: it presents a near-constant stream of obstacles to the people striving to make a living within its prescribed “city limits,” foremost being the mobile developers who build apps in hopes of monetizing them.

In his celebrated collection of modern-day fables, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino relates the story of the (fictional) city of “Leonia,” a city that “refashions itself each day: every morning the people wake between fresh seats, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap… And on the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck.”

In writing of Leonia, Calvino might just as well have been writing about Apptropolis. In a digital space where anything can be uploaded, upgraded, and then just as swiftly deleted, apps become disposable almost from the moment they hit the app store. For most mobile developers, monetizing in Apptropolis remains an elusive work of fiction. If you don’t believe me, here’s a case study to consider: the Helsinki-based mobile games studio, Rovio, was actually on the verge of bankruptcy on the eve of releasing its multibillion-download app, Angry Birds.

According to Andrew Chen, Head of Driver Acquisition at Uber, today’s average Google Play app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAU) within 72 hours after initial download. In other words, unless your app is on par with the likes of Uber, Facebook or Clash of Clans, the odds of high user churn rate are almost certain. Fickle mobile users will simply dispose of one newfangled app in favor of another, newfanglier one.

A recent study, conducted by AppsFlyer, asked users to list the reasons they chose to uninstall certain apps from their mobile devices. A full 29% of respondents indicated that “Intrusive ads” were a principal reason they chose to uninstall their apps.

That’s much too high a percentile. In fact, it’s unacceptable. What should we, as an industry, do to fix it?

First, we can accelerate new mobile in-app video advertising formats like outstream. We already know that TV viewership is tumbling steadily in favor of digital devices, and that many of these new viewers access their favorite movies and TV shows via mobile apps. Unlike pre-roll video advertisements, outstream videos are displayed in a format that allows all publishers—not just video publishers—to monetize their apps successfully with video advertising. Moreover, studies show that outstream video ads increase brand exposure 10% more than their pre-roll video cousins.

In the same way that cookies track the demographics of different web audiences, new and powerful mobile analytics tools are able to analyze the actions of app users. Better mobile forecasting and analytics tools can only lead to better outcomes – and to better video ads being served. App developers ought to look at the TV buyer market, enrich their mobile outstream impressions with demographic data, and sell into video buyers.

Second, we should implement programmatic native in-app advertising on a scale that has yet to be attempted. It’s long been proven that native ads have higher CTRs than display ads, especially for mobile. But our industry should also develop new ways to use native advertising in gaming apps so that they become a seamless part of the game experience. The MRAID mobile interstitial ads of today should be replaced with outstream video, natively pre-cached into feeds.

Finally, we need to find better ways for app developers to maximize their yield. Header bidding helps display publishers improve their total yields by allowing multiple buyers bid for their inventory on a level playing field rather than via a single exchange. Having multiple bidding partners vying for your inventory means more price competition to monetize your app.

New “mobile” versions of header bidding are now cropping up in the market, allowing mobile developers to partner with multiple mobile ad networks simultaneously. Given the success of header bidding, it stands to reason that mobile app developers should adopt these new tools as soon as possible.

As an industry, we often find ourselves engaged in Herculean feats of hand wringing about the need to “create better ads,” ads able to engage and retain the interest of users across multiple digital channels. Real solutions already exist on the market that can help app developers monetize. It now becomes a question of integrating and scaling these solutions into the marketplace that’s able to provide them.

As Senior Vice President of Marketing at AppNexus, Pat drives the company’s effort to ensure that all stakeholders enjoy optimal visibility into our products, capabilities and vision. He leads the company’s corporate marketing functions, including corporate communications, branding and customer experience, and works across Business Units and product teams to ensure the consistency and quality of our communication. Previously, Pat served as Senior Vice President of Products at AppNexus and he joined AppNexus via the acquisition of Fantuition, a startup he co-founded. Prior to founding Fantuition, Pat was an early executive at Right Media and later served as Vice President of Marketing at Yahoo!.

Audiences | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Digital news audiences shift to mobile as platform widens margin vs. desktop

September 30, 2015 DCN

The rise of mobile among digital news audiences has been swift and relentless, and in just the past half year has gone from being neck-and-neck with desktop audiences to nearly 50% greater. How has mobile been able to surge ahead so quickly, and what are the implications for digital media economics as audiences shift?

To better understand the audience dynamics in today’s digital news environment, I conducted an analysis of leading digital news properties along with Andrew Lipsman, comScore VP of Marketing & Insights. We pulled together a selection of 25 leading news publishers, which ran the gamut from traditional print publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post to digital-first news entities like Buzzfeed and Vox, and computed their average audience and engagement metrics across desktop and mobile, app and mobile web.

As the above graph shows, the average number of desktop unique visitors to news sites was moving more or less in tandem with the average number of mobile unique visitors until late 2014. At that point there began to be a noticeable divergence in the two curves. As mobile unique visitors continued to quickly rise, desktop unique visitors softened. These opposing trends have continued on through June, indicating that more and more people are choosing to get the news on smartphones and tablets rather than on desktop.

Is Mobile Now Cannibalizing Desktop in the News Category?
The question arises whether it’s fair to suggest that mobile may finally be cannibalizing desktop. But first, some good news: on balance, news audiences are growing overall because the huge gains in mobile audience are substantially outweighing any softening on desktop. So in theory, this should be a boon to the digital news business because bigger audiences should translate into more ad or subscription dollars.

But the economics are not that simple. If mobile ad CPMs are, on average, lower than desktop ad CPMs the potential for cannibalization is real.

What is actually happening in terms of content audiences and engagement? The metrics below suggest that cannibalization might indeed be happening. When we looked at the six-month period beginning December 2014, which marked the start of the trend divergence, desktop news experienced a 13% drop in average audience while mobile news jumped 14% during that span. We also observed a 5% drop in desktop news engagement while mobile engagement jumped 21%.

Mobile is picking up the slack for desktop, and then some. And while desktop is in no real risk of cratering, it’s clear that audience growth today is coming from mobile and that digital news organizations should be pointing their strategy in the direction of that opportunity. This begs another important question as to what is the best path for mobile growth: apps or mobile web?

Apps vs. Mobile Web: Which Matters More to News Publishers?When a news consumer reads a New York Times article on their phone, are they more likely to do so via the newspaper’s app or on the mobile web, and which access method drives more overall consumption of content? The answer is while the mobile web is a much more important driver of audience, apps have a disproportionately high impact on engagement.

The graph above shows that an overwhelming majority – 93% – of these news publishers’ mobile audiences come from the mobile web rather than from an app. This is likely because many people get their news fix by way of social referral, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. This has the positive benefit of expanding news brands out to new audiences, but many of these “drive-by” visitors are more promiscuous with their news consumption. Loyalty is generally not their forte.

On the other hand, while apps comprise an average of just 6% of the 25 news properties’ mobile audiences, they account for nearly half (45%) of the time that audience spends with those properties. So although news apps may not be the most popular access method, their audience is clearly engaged in a way that the mobile web audience is not.

Someone who absently scrolls through their newsfeed on their phone and opens an interesting story only to close it moments later, might also open the New York Times app and spend a considerable amount of time cycling through each section. How they arrive at that content matters, and how they feel about that brand before engaging with the content determines how much time they’re likely to spend with it. “The mobile browser on a smartphone is a point of convenience,” Dow Jones’ chief innovation officer said recently. The app, on the other hand, “is the place where you discover engagement.”

But – and this is a big but – it’s not enough for a publisher to simply get their app on someone’s phone. The app must also occupy that hallowed real estate – often the homescreen – where users are more likely to engage with it. This is easier said than done. However, there are many clever strategies out there that publishers have yet to employ or even yet to discover.

Jacob L. Nelson (@JNelz) is a doctoral student in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology, and Society program and spent the summer working as an intern at comScore. A former journalist, his research looks at news consumption and media metrics.

Innovation

Updated Love My Shape App Should Inspire Some Creative Marketing Exercises

August 28, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Just this week, new research from The CMO Council and IBM found that advertising budgets are rising—but so are marketers’ expectations. According to the research, marketers recognize the ability of digital to align with every stage of the buyer’s journey and plan to invest accordingly. They are also increasingly experimental, exploring a wide range of channels and tactics to connect with buyers. This doesn’t surprise John Balen, Shape’s Associate Publisher, Marketing who has watched this trend develop over the past several years: Marketers want new and exciting ways to engage potential buyers.

So while Shape, like its fellow Meredith publications, has a subscription-based digital replica app that updates with each issue, the brand also has a very different app: Love My Shape. Originally launched about a year ago as a way to leverage mobile to seamlessly bridge print and digital experiences, Balen notes that they’ve learned a lot about what marketers and consumers want over that year and have incorporated the knowledge into an upgraded version, launching with the September issue of the magazine.

It is significant to note that the development of the Love My Shape app was driven by marketer demand for innovative cross-media experiences. Initially, Balen says that marketers were conducting a lot of one-off experiments with scan-the-page-for-more offerings. Demand for interactive, cross-platform programs continued to climb, however, and the editorial side of the house grew increasingly excited about creating cross-platform experiences that better serve its readers (and drive traffic to the website). With the new edition of the app, Balen says that internal processes have been streamlined and that interactive elements are no longer conceived of as one-offs, rather they are built into the ad sales and editorial mindset and workflow.

The Shape editorial team has been enthusiastic about being able to drive readers off the pages and Balen points to Shape editor Elizabeth Goodman Artis’ letter in the September issue as proof. In it, Artis is practically giddy as she describes the ease of moving from discovering a great item in an issue to getting one delivered to your doorstep. She also raves about the opportunity to take fitness coverage off the page and bring it to life it with video content in the app.

All of this excitement doesn’t overwhelm Meredith’s continued stance on the separation of church and state. Shape does not currently offer any of its own ecommerce initiatives nor does it participate in a revenue share in its click-to-buy editorial offers. Rather, the editorial team views these as a way to ease the path for readers who are as enthusiastic about fitness gear as they are the stories about how to use it. The integrations, according to Balen, “always have to be on-brand, something that has the DNA of the brand, makes sense for our readers and that the editors support.”

The app provides the ability to activate many mobile-enhanced content and promotional features from issues of the magazine and signage at Shape events. This includes sweepstakes, exclusive videos, behind-the-scenes content, and instructional fitness, beauty and fashion demos. The updated app also incorporates geo-location; image recognition; augmented reality; and contextual content—all of which can be leveraged for editorial or marketer-driven content.

“Today’s marketers want wow,” says Balen. “They are looking for high impact units whether it is fun fold out covers or interacting with digital. Marketers want people to experience their ads and say ‘This is so much fun, I love it!’” Ultimately, he says, his team must work closely with marketers to build integrated ad experiences that not only capture consumers’ attention, but provide experiences and information they find useful and entertaining. And with the updated Love My Shape app, Balen says that everyone on the Shape team is going to have fun creating print-to-digital experiences that jump off the page and engage.

Logging in

Multimedia apps

Games and growth

Strategy: One app, six titles

A premium reading experience

A long-term play

Promising early results

Rethinking ASO

Localization differs from internationalization

Cater to local cultures

Primary design considerations:

Pay attention to the political spectrum

Socializing

Listen Up

More Content, More Consumption

Engagement from the Start

The Mother of all Metrics

Quality Rules

Mobile App Usage

Multitasking Sessions

Multitasking Likelihood

App Engagement

Among the findings: