The last few years have been... busy. The kind of busy you'd read about in the news, which is why demand for new aggregation apps like Google News has been very high for a few years now.
Aggregators, such as Apple News and unlike news outlets like CNN or Fox, bring news from multiple outlets together into a single feed, and have become very popular in part thanks to politics.
But the trend is changing. Looking at the downloads, it's safe to say news fatigue is real and it's fully settled in at this point!
Rewinding time back to 2018, the top news aggregators saw an average of 4.5M downloads per month. And when I say top I'm talking about Google News, Smart News, and News Break.
2019 was a slower news year so downloads dropped, but then covid struck and downloads exploded for a short bit. At its peak, the trend grazed 9M downloads in one month. Pandemic and politics couldn't maintain the downloads and they started sloping down.
2021 saw a bit more excitement, but by the end of 2022 all of that excitement was gone and the drop intensified.
The group ended 2022 with 1.5M downloads, according to our estimates. That's a drop of more than 60% from where they started!
Now's probably not the best time to launch a new news aggregator...
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
Wall Street bet $2 billion on Polymarket, and downloads surged 1,172% in December. The prediction market banned in 2022 is now where Wall Street looks for signals.