WebProNews

Tag: News Apps

  • Flipboard Gets the New York Times and their Paywall

    Flipboard, the fashionable reading app for smartphones and tablets, is getting the New York Times. While it’s true readers have always had access to the New York Times articles, they haven’t ever been able to view those in Flipboard’s highly-polished layout.

    Starting Thursday, all that will change. Flipboard will offer current subscribers everything the New York Times publishes. So if you have the app and you’re a Times subscriber, you no longer have to sift through social media feeds to get your news.

    This is the first time the New York Times has brought its pay meter to a platform they didn’t own, but it’s all part of the publication’s new initiative to bring the New York Times to every format available (being called “NYT Everywhere”) for its paid subscribers.

    The two companies will split the advertising revenue generated by the collaboration. It’s a significant partnership for both companies, and more importantly, it’s an indicator of where media is headed in the future.

    Denise F. Warren, general manager of The Times’s Web site, comments on the new partnership with Flipboard:

    “We realized that we have an opportunity to enable this kind of access for paying subscribers, and we thought it was something we ought to try and see how users react to it,”

    Flipboard founder, Mike McCue, comments on the partnership with the New York Times:

    “It is a major achievement for our company, and I think it’s going to set the stage for digital media and in the publishing world in general,”

    “What we’re doing together is amazing.”

    As always, the Top News section will still be available for viewing by non-subscribers. Flipboard has already made similar partnerships with media publishers like ABC News, USA Today, Wired and Vanity Fair. We’ll keep you posted as the New York Times continues to bring their publication to additional platforms.

  • Users Reading More News on Mobile Devices

    It was recently reported that news content brings in 7% of of Apple Newsstand’s monthly gross of roughly $70,000 – while this doesn’t seem like much, a newer study reveals that users of mobile news apps now read more articles and long-form content than regular computer users.

    news apps

    news apps

    The January Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found that when searching for news stories, 33% of users went directly to the news outlets website, while using a desktop or a mobile device, while 38% of tablet users did the same. This suggests that readers go to sources they have existing knowledge of. In general, 54% of consumers in the US used the web to read the news, whether on a desktop or mobile device, and most those surveyed tend to mix it up – i.e. combine web-based formats when reading stories. Of those who read content on a desktop, 34% also read articles on their smartphones, and 17% used a tablet device. Those using both tablets and smartphones accounted for 27% of consumers in the study, and 5% of users get on all three.

    An interesting facet of the study concerns the general ineffectiveness of Facebook and Twitter regarding the relaying of news links. Recent reports have shown that both social networks were not particularly integral in the driving of new stories, and now data shows that only 8% and 3% of tablet uses follow links through Facebook and Twitter respectively. As for Facebook, this trend stands in contrast to its effectiveness in product marketing, as 92% of users queried in the Global Trust and Advertising Survey state that they would buy a product based on a friend’s recommendation. It would seem that users don’t trust the social network so much when it comes to news.