Demand for News Apps Quadrupled Last Week - CNN, Al Jazeera, and Newsmax In the Lead
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #103 - The Downloads Don't Stop. Check out the full article for more insights.
News is obviously hot right now, and I already showed that it's channels and not aggregators that are in demand last week. That was using ranks.
This week I have numbers to back it up and show which news channel is most in demand right now. And it's not what I was expecting.
For this analysis, I compared the downloads of the most popular news apps before and after the invasion began.
I focused on apps that are only used for news and didn't include Twitter and Reddit. They're great sources for news, and if you recall from last week's analysis, have increased in popularity a lot recently. But news isn't the only use for them, so a spike isn't only because of that.
On to numbers!
In relative terms, Al Jazeera saw the most growth in downloads, going from about 5K estimated weekly downloads earlier in February to more than 160K last week. An increase of 2,880%.
In absolute terms, CNN was the most in demand news app last week, adding 270K new downloads last week, according to our estimates. CNN gets more downloads normally, so in terms of growth, it's only 493%.
Newsmax, Fox News, and BBC News also grew triple-digit percentages last week. But aggregators NewsBreak and Google News both lost downloads, -6% and -13%, respectively.
We estimate that last week brought roughly 580K new downloads, meaning in addition to what's expected, for top news apps around the world.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
