Audience vs. Consumption
News24’s iPhone app launched about a month ago, and the uptake has been pretty good as of late. Although the uptake decreases with time, it’s amazing how much time is spent within the application. I’m going to show you a snippet of info pertaining to the last 3 weeks of usage.
I find it astonishing that 6250 uniques over a period of 3 weeks are able to spend 1 year and 105 days within the application. That’s an average of 1.7 hours per visitor in 2 weeks. Woah… That’s not so bad.
iPhone users are heavy internet users and this proves it. Although they are a small % of the market make up, they are the ones who are consuming the most.
Compare this to our m.24.com WAP offering, where the average time spent per visit is in the region of 3-4 minutes! Obviously, the WAP offering appeals to a wider audience, of which a large part would fall under the lower LSM categories. M.24.com’s properties are generating in the reagion of 100-110k unique visitors a month with approximately 1.3 million page impressions. A lot more than the iPhone app.
This leaves the question, who are advertisers after? How efficient is it to purchase advertising based purely on stats (Obviously it depends on the product / service being advertised). I think this confirms my solid belief in advertising by way of branded mobile applications as opposed to slapping a banner on a WAP site purely because of it’s numbers.
What do you think?
Interview – Digital Edge
Saul, from The Digital edge recently rang me up to ask me a few questions regarding 24.com, mobile and the News24 iPhone application.
Thought it was a pretty interesting podcast. Looking forward to the next mobile episode. Don’t believe me though, head over here and listen for yourself.
Thanks for talking to me.
News24 iPhone app – now live.
I haven’t said much regarding the launch of the iPhone app since it’s launch, mostly because I have been doing so on Twitter.
The app launched a few days ago, and I’d personally like to thank all the users who have downloaded and delivered feedback thus far. The feedback has been mostly positive and some decent feature requests have come through. Thanks.
FYI: The app is now the #1 application on the South African appstore, and somewhere in the top 50 globally (for News apps). We already have almost 2000 daily users which is pretty decent given the fact that it launched at the beginning of a mini holiday.
I’ll push through some more stats once they improve a bit 
To download, click here.
Until next time
News 24 iPhone app goes into ALPHA.
Recently 24.com pushed the News 24 iPhone application into the wild open for ALPHA testing to a few ’select’ users.
The idea behind the 24.com iPhone application is not a desperate attempt at creating new revenue streams, but more a future investment by 24.com in the mobile space. We thought it important to jump on this bandwagon in order to learn and create new distribution channels and functionality.
The development of this application has been broken down into a multiple phase one. Phase 1 is purely a cycle where we look at optimizing the distribution and cleaning up of XML feeds to an extent where it does not crash every 3 refreshes (ala NYT). Further navigation has been quite important and made to be as efficient as it can be given the interface and development functionality. You’ll notice that the application has all the sub categories housed under the specific channel, whereas many other apps clunk everything into the ‘more’ section, we have opted to keep as much of the content within the first 4 options on a per channel basis. Phase 1 also looks at sharing the content with the most used social networks, of course this is standard.
Further in Phase 1, we have implemented a restaurant search which opens up G Maps and pinpoints the restaurants within your location (using GPS). In Phase 2 this will be within the app and will no longer branch out, unless a use requests directions (and that does not work in SA anyway).
A few web services that we currently have on our WAP site, will be integrated and opened as is within the application as well. These include (TV Guide, Lotto Results, Movie Info & Astro.
Further phases will look at integrating utilities. My vision for utilities are that they are the next advertising rev stream, think *branded* utility advertising.
To be honest, Phase 2 has not yet been specified and I will focus on that as soon as Phase 1 has launched. Given the latest release of iPhone 3.0 software, a whole new playing field has emerged for us to play on.
I can accommodate a few more BETA testers, so if you would like to get involved in the short test period, please send me your UDID & your E-Mail address (Use contact form).
How to piss off a blogger.
Got this in a group Skype chat and thought it was actually rather true.
Rohit Bargava ran a conversation with about 70 participants at the SXSW with the purpose of establishing a list of “10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger”. I think the group did an excellent job. Here’s the list:
1. Invite bloggers to participate in something and don’t give them a chance to talk about themselves. This was what I opened the session with, followed by letting people around the group introduce their name and their blogs. A list of people who chose to share their names and blogs is at the end of this post. 2. Pretend to be a “long time reader” when you actually just visited the blog once and read a few posts. 3. Use a blogger’s content or identity without giving proper attribution 4. Send irrelevant information that exhibits no understanding of what they care about or fail to personalize it 5. Add them to a PR list and don’t let them get off of it 6. Make it hard for them to link to something by hiding your content behind usernames/passwords, giving them uncertain directions or requiring them to take multiple steps 7. Ask for favors as part of your first outreach to them without building a relationship or earning the right to ask them to help you 8. Fail to identify yourself or falsely represent yourself as something or someone you are not. This includes failing to mention something about your or your employer that is relevant. 9. Set an unreasonable expectation for a blogger and expect things in an unreasonable amount of time … i.e. sending information and expecting them to post within a few hours. Quick poll of our session showed that for the vast majority of bloggers, it’s not their day job. 10. Get the journalism relationship right. Some bloggers consider themselves journalists and others don’t. It was clear from the participants that this is a tricky subject, as some people also noted after the session.
hahah!!