Apps - are they alive or dead?
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How publishers and content owners should make decisions on whether to invest in websites or apps for their mobile audiences.
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Apps - are they alive or dead?
- 2. WE ARE A TEAM OF MEDIA PRODUCT SPECIALISTS. We help ambitious companies build and grow their digital businesses.
- 5. + Home Screen Button + Focus & clarity of use + Offline + Pre-download + Additional functionality + Contained reading experience
- 6. There have been some very public failures!
- 7. Source: Marketing Land Part of the problem is that we don’t *always* want an “app for that”.
- 8. of smartphone users download an app or more a month. 34% is the average number of apps used per month - the same figure since 2012. 26 80% of a user’s mobile time is spent in spent in just five apps. Source: Andrew Chen &n Business Insider
- 9. Losing over 80% of your users the day after download your app is normal. Source: Andrew Chen
- 10. We wanted to minimise friction and encourage readers to share our stories. We designed the site first for tablets, then for mobile and as a classic website, in that order," Kevin Delaney Editor in Chief & President Case Study Using a responsive website to build audience & brand.
- 11. “ The first daily edition in The Economist’s 171- year history, it does what we have always done, distilling what’s important from the news and telling you what it means, but on a daily rather than a weekly basis. “ Case Study Using an app to drive engagement with committed readers.
- 12. 60% of a users opt out of push - particularly on news apps. A wide, existing user group to market to Carefully designed and managed acquisition and retention and engagement plans A clearly defined proposition against a compelling, regular user need Source: Andrew Chen
Editor's Notes
- Sally Foote I’m one of the founders of FEB.
- We’re a digital product development consultancy.
- We work primarily with publishers and content owners and we help them to build and grow businesses around their content. We find and shape new product opportunities, develop growth strategies and tactics for existing products and work with editorial and technical teams to build their digital experience and entrench product thinking.
- In our work with publishers and content owners, we are often asked to help answer the question of where to focus investment for mobile audiences - responsive websites or apps? This is a very high level overview. Apps are hugely popular They completely dominate the time we spend on our phones. Nearly 90% of time spent on mobile is in apps. Source: http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
- Why is that? What is it about apps that makes them so appealing? Having an icon on the home screen of the device makes a good focal point - you can easily get back to something you’re looking for. Apps usually provide a focus - you open them because there is something specific you want to do and the app meets that need. The best apps have genuine clarity of use. They *tend* to work offline so you can use them anywhere Apps can pre-download content while you’re not using them They usually also have additional functionality (e.g. save for later, personalisation, integration with calendar) And increasingly people love apps in the publishing space because they’re a contained reading experience with clear navigation paths. They often set out the path through the content and give you a clear start and end.
- So why are we even having this debate then? Why, after an initial flurry of investment have publishers stopped investing as enthusiastically in apps? The main reason is that apps have largely failed to deliver on the early hype. Most publishers will tell you that it has very difficult to deliver an RIO on the app investment and that they’re expensive to maintain. We’ve also seen some very public examples of failures across the board. Including big players like News Corp who launching The Daily with sizeable investments in editorial, tech and marketing. Through to smaller hugely innovative initiatives like The Magazine - which was lauded at launch for it’s really well thought through UX designed specifically around mobile and tablet reading.
- Why are publishers failing to make a roaring success of apps? Partly because it’s not always as simple as that - we don’t *always* prefer an app to a website. It varies depending on what we’re up. This graph shows how for gaming the usage is absolutely skewed towards to apps but for news it still tends to be a pretty even split. Source: http://marketingland.com/study-despite-time-spent-apps-win-mobile-web-just-important-114407
- The second and most crucial issue is that it very difficult to get people to download an app in the first place. Most people - over 66% - do not even download a single app a month. Given the volume of apps being published into the stores that’s a difficult place from which to start. And then there’s the fact that most people use very few apps on their phones. The average is 26. You would expect to have gone up over time as more and more innovative and interesting apps are created, we would use more and more apps. But no - the number has been static since 2012. 26 apps is about the maximum number that people use. Worse still - of all those that they use, they spend 80% of their time in just 5 of them. And you probably list those now. Sources: Apps per month: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-apps-people-download-per-month-2014-8?IR=T Apps used: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/11/time-spent-in-apps-up-63-percent-over-past-two-years-but-apps-used-monthly-shows-little-change/
- You can see that played out in retention rates as well. Losing 80% of your audience on Day 1 after download is what normal looks like. And normal is getting worse. In 2013 it you could expect to lose 75% of your audience straight away, but a year later that had halved to 12%. Getting share of voice and of readers time in that space, is very, very difficult and you need to be completely realistic about what your brand can achieve with your audience. Building an app is not the hard part - getting people to use it takes time, effort and a huge amount of marketing and very few brands have been successful at it. Sources: http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/ http://andrewchen.co/mobile-retention-benchmarks-for-2014-vs-2013-show-a-50-drop-in-d1-retention-guest-post/ http://andrewchen.co/mobile-retention-benchmarks-for-2014-vs-2013-show-a-50-drop-in-d1-retention-guest-post/
- Where to start The simplest place to start is what you really want to achieve for your brand. Are you trying to acquire new customers, build your user base or grow your reach? If the answer is yes, then I would advocate focusing on your responsive website and its ability to work across the web and other distribution platforms (like Facebook , email etc) to pull in new readers and build commitment from casual readers. Case Study: Quartz Quartz have done that incredibly successfully. Launched in 2012 as an entirely new brands. Grew readership to 5m UU in the first year and doubled that again to 10m in the second year. Explicitly taken a web app approach from the outset because reach was most important to them. Recognising that people weren’t going to come to the homepage of a brand they had never heard of they focused on social distribution - 85% of the traffic to their site comes through what they call ‘earned traffic’ - primarily social referrals They use a daily newsletter to drive repeat engagement for regular readers
- On the other hand if you have an established audience and your focus is to increase their engagement with your content and brand then an app can be the best way to do this. You need to be very specific about the audience segment you’re targeting and the need you’re addressing. The need must be ideally be frequent, self-triggering and your content must serve it well. Be realistic about the whole lives of your readers and the role you play in them. Provide them with something that is genuinely useful. Your app should not do the same the as your website. It doesn’t have to be the same set of content and it definitely shouldn’t be the same user experience. Case Study: Economist Espresso Launched in Nov 2014 as a complementary to their existing products. LIkely to have contributed significantly to 225% reported YoY digital subs growth. Updated every morning is a refined, manageable, finishable contained reading experience Complements the existing product rather than replacing it. It grows the habitual relationship for core readers from weekly to daily. It has almost certainly started with the engaged users and grown from there. Feature light - designed around improving the ‘finishing’ experience.
- The key things is getting the mix right between what you are trying to achieve and what your readers really want. There are three critical factors for app success for publishers: Having a wide, existing, user base that your are able to market to Carefully designing and managing your acquisition and retention plan - you can’t just rely on push notifications A clearly defined proposition that matches a compelling and regular user need. Source: http://andrewchen.co/why-people-are-turning-off-push/