One of my favourite US sites to read about all things cool in Digital, is All Things Digital. One of my favourite journalists on here is Kara because of her more analytical, chart driven approach to looking at digital. Of course, all the team are excellent and if they pick this post up and want me to add some Englishness to their site I would be more than willing.
Kara’s charts are thought provoking. The latest one I have seen is the chart below showcasing application loyalty by category. Clearly, the place to be is the top right quadrant where high frequency of usage and high retention occur. This is the dwelling place of the likes of Sky Sports Football Centre, BBC News and Weather. Daily activities breed daily frequency of usage.. the cyclist who checks the weather before hopping on his daily commute, the press buyer who checks the News to see how topical to be today.
What is also interesting for me, is the fact “entertainment” apps sit in the low retention, low frequency. As this is split out from “music” and “games” I can only presume this application field is movies and TV series. To me, this seems like a slightly suprising result. Delivery of short-form Cinema/TV review programmes to a iPhone could be a really great way of activating this field. I can only presume the current offerings from entertainment brands are just not capitalising on the consumer desire to access this sort of entertainment via applications? I know Hulu has an iPhone App which is coming soon, so hopefully this might provide a shift for “entertainment”.
I think this chart proves one of two things:
1) There still aren’t “great” apps being produced which fulfill our lifestyle media habits e.g. entertainment apps, music apps, gaming
2) The simplest apps work best. CNN, Sky News, BBC News, all relatively simple apps but feature in the area of higest retention and frequency.
