Readers Choose CNN and Fox Over Aggregators
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #102 - Is the App Store Ready for This?. Check out the full article for more insights.
With so much happening in the news this week, I had to look to see if the trend we've seen in the last few years with news apps continued.
That trend is that more users downloaded news aggregation apps, like NewsBreak and SmartNews, in times of unrest than apps from specific networks like CNN and Fox.
Surprisingly, aggregators aren't in the lead today.
Downloads of CNN and Fox's flagship news app have increased over the last 48 hours, pushing them above news aggregation apps which are usually in the lead.
As of Friday morning, CNN is the 3rd most popular app in the news category in the US App Store. Fox is right behind it in #4.
Popular aggregator NewsBreak and SmartNews are currently sitting in #5 and #8, respectively.
I know some of you will respond telling me CNN is better than Fox and others that Fox is better than CNN. I'm not making any claims here about the two but merely comparing them together to their alternatives, which are news aggregators.
Why is this? It's hard to tell. I think it's a sign of the times we're in and how news, just like every other content out there, is opinionated. Aggregators miss that on purpose. But...
Above all of these sit Twitter and Reddit, the aggregator of aggregators. What differentiates those two is that they're opinionated aggregators. I hope you see the pattern here.
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