With a new president installed, this has been a big week for the United States — and, to paraphrase Billy Madison, news app are reaping all the benefits.
According to a new report by top app analytics platform Sensor Tower, news apps in the App Store received a nice Inauguration Day bump. Three of the big winners were CNN‘s news app, aggregator News Break, and Newsmax. They respectively jumped 530, 13, and 43 spots in the App Store rankings.
The report notes that:
“Sensor Tower’s preliminary data shows that CNN saw approximately 27,000 installs on January 20 from U.S. app stores, up 170 percent from 10,000 the day before. News Break rose 5 percent day-over-day from 59,000 installs to 62,000, and Newsmax climbed 14 percent from 35,000 to about 40,000.”
Sensor Tower claims that similar install number boosts took place on Election Day 2020. Interestingly — although, perhaps, not overly surprising — Fox News’ app achieved a big boost on Election Day, climbing higher than any of the above apps. But it didn’t receive anywhere near the same increase on Inauguration Day.
Apple’s News efforts
Apple has been trying to get on board the news train for some time now. It launched its News app aggregator service in September 2015. This replaced the previous Newsstand app, which let users download newspapers and magazines. Current U.S. President Biden is reportedly a big Apple News guy.
Apple announced its subscription news and magazine service Apple News+ in early 2019. It offers access to content from more than 300 magazines and selected newspapers for a monthly fee of $9.99 per month. You can also get News+ as part of the Apple One Premier bundle. This features all Apple services — including Arcade, Fitness, Music, and TV+ — for up to six users for $29.95 a month. Apple hasn’t yet released numbers to show how many people subscribe to Apple News+.
It will be interesting to see whether the service got a similar Inauguration Day bump.
Source: Sensor Tower