Report: People now spend 4-5 hours a day in apps. What are they doing? PLUS tips from a marketer on growing your newsletter and social media audience

August 04, 2022

I wanted to flag up that I’m writing another newsletter now. Every Wednesday I will be writing a newsletter for my day job at Pugpig. (If you'd like, please sign up.) Today, I look at a report about that shows that the pandemic surge in mobile app usage has staying power with several countries including the US, U.K. and Australia seeing continued growth in daily app time. I also look at CherryRoad Media, a technology company based in New Jersey that has been buying up newspapers across the Plains states and South and how a journalist turned marketer grew her newsletter and social media following by 60x - ok from 1000 to 60,000. But there are some good tips for media as well.

CherryRoad Media CEO and founder Jeremy Gulban started his business with specific goals and values in mind but without a specific set of plans. He wanted his technology company to support local journalism, and a huge opportunity gave him that chance. Today, CherryRoad Media owns 64 newspapers in 10 states.

When people think of tech buying up media, their first thought is Jeff Bezos buying up the Washington Post, but there is another major story unfolding at the local level in the US with New Jersey tech entrepreneur Jeremy Gulban and buying up local newspapers across the middle of the US - from the Dakotas to Texas. I have long thought that Gannett would start disposing of its small properties as it focuses more on a regional-national strategy instead of the local to national strategy that it pursued when I was a regional executive editor and news director for them. Cherry Road is one of the groups that is buying up those papers and using its tech expertise to support these small papers. It is a fascinating development.

The company has taken a hit largely due to expenses as its earnings report emphasizes a 1800,000 growth in digital subscribers

In the beginning of the digital media revolution, we spoke about that great unbundling, as specialist services and sites peeled away audiences from generalist publications like newspapers, which tried to be everything to everyone in their community. Bit by bit, whether it was on the commercial side with classified sites like Craigslist, Cars.com or online real estate listings or the editorial side with specialist news sites, that bundle was pulled apart.

But now the New York Times is working to reconstitute the bundle, this time in digital form, adding cooking, puzzles, reviews (WireCutter) and sports (The Athletic) to its bundle. And it continues to power growth even during as the US faces higher inflation and a softening economy.

We asked Amanda Natividad how she built an audience of 100k+ followers on Twitter alone.

I am constantly scanning the horizon for lessons from industries outside of media on how to grow audiences or digital businesses, and this profile of Amanda Natividad on her path to growing her Twitter following from 1000 to 60,000 and now 100,000. This is a solid lesson: Choose value over virality. You can game the attention economy using tricks, or you can build long-term value for your audiences or customers and capture that value by building long-term relationships with those customers.

While the daily time spent in apps varies by country, there are now 13 markets where users are spending more than four hours per day using apps.

The report from data.ai highlights how app usage spiked during the pandemic as people were forced to do more things online and on their mobile devices - such as ordering food, banking or shopping. Now in markets around the world including the US, UK, Australia and Singapore that trend is proving durable. Interestingly, social and media apps still dominate. I will be diving into the report to find out what other apps are still engaging heavy users.

The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.

I am a sceptic of NFTs, but I can see how blockchain might allow educational publisher Pearson to capture value from the used textbook market.

With Zette, Yehong Zhu says she has what young readers want and can succeed where other startups have failed

Maybe this edition of the newsletter is the sceptics edition. I have seen so many efforts at building the ‘iTunes for news’ that I have a standard response: People listen to songs several times, but a piece of news has a short shelf life. But I don’t want to dismiss innovation out of hand. I think that this is down to pricing and conversion. Pricing for informational ephemera always tilts towards the ‘information wants to be free’ part of the spectrum, where valuable insights and research or engaging features that one wants to savour sit more on the information wants to expensive end of the spectrum.

How Clean Is Your Data? (And How To Keep It Clean) - 08/03/2022

When i do data journalism courses or analytics consulting, i always say that the first and often most time-consuming part of the process is cleaning your data. here is a good primer on how to do that.

The Semafor co-founder appears to be running out of ways to pitch his buzzy news startup. Having just hired a couple of journalists in Africa, he analogized his ambitions to Netflix’s international footprint, but in an interview with Vanity Fair, he didn’t seem quite sure what he meant by that.

First we have the iTunes for news and now Ben Smith is talking about the Netflix for news. Vanity Fair finds the analogy thin, but I think it’s a bit more compelling than the iTunes, single purchase analogy. Semafor wants local journalists to create journalism for local audiences as Netflix creates shows regionally to satisfy regional tastes. Interesting, but I think that just as with the iTunes metaphor that the Netflix comparison from the world of entertainment might not be applicable for journalism. But there are some very smart folks working on this project, including my friend Gina Chua. If they are able to take the local reporting that they do and interpret it for global, mobile audiences, that could be a winning formula.