What We Learned Making Our Infographic: Your Blog Will Benefit From a Dedicated App

Last week we set out to produce Mawla’s first infographic. We wanted to look at the benefits of dedicated apps for blogs. After some thorough research, we produced an informative and entertaining graphic that re-enforces our beliefs that apps add value to blogs. For those of you interested in a more wordy discussion, we on the Mawla team have fleshed out our findings into the few points below.

1. Big Companies are Pushing Content Through Apps

Companies like Facebook, Google and Apple want their customers to consume data through mobile apps. In recent times, Facebook has deliberately and purposefully broken its platform into multiple apps each with a distinct purpose. People now consume ‘Facebook’ data through Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp. Mark Zuckerberg talks in depth about their decision to move Messenger to a dedicated app here in detail. In this case, the reasoning behind it isn’t as important as Facebook’s commitment to mobile apps and their efforts to encourage their customers to consume data through mobile apps. We can see the same trend in Google who’s services have been broken down into a collection of individual apps to provide mobile users with the best possible experience.

Large enterprises are pushing customers to consume data through apps. As we have seen before with other technologies, there will be a brief lag in uptake as smaller operations come to terms with this new way of doing things, followed by a scramble to catch up. We’re past the early adopter stage for mobile apps, the time to begin providing content through apps is now.

2. Your Readers Love Apps

Since 2014, there have been more mobile devices than desktop computers in circulation. The general trend of a rising number of mobile devices and a declining number of mobile devices is expected to continue and Gartner has recently predicted that by 2018, people will turn to mobile search first before resorting to using desktop devices to research products or information. The newsroom summary of this research by Gartner can be found here for anyone without a Gartner subscription.

What we found interesting is that once people migrate to mobile devices, their preferred way to consume data is through apps. Flurry recently published an article that shows that the time spent in mobile apps accounts for 86% of peoples’ total time on mobile devices! This number is up from 80% a year ago and we can see that the gap between time spent in apps and browsers is increasing rapidly. For bloggers, this means that if you provide content solely through a browser you aren’t meeting your readers’ wants or expectations. More importantly, you are competing for the remaining 14% of mobile users’ time with every other website that does not have a dedicated app.

Even more impressive than time spent in mobile apps is the volume of apps that people keep on their mobile devices. This French company have researched the number of apps people have on their phones. Currently 50% of mobile device owners have more than 10 apps installed on their device, 29% have more than 30 apps on their device and 12% have an astounding 50+ apps on their device!

Your readers love apps, its their preferred way to consume data. Are you doing enough to accommodate them?

3. There is a Market for Informative Apps

When we set out to examine the potential market for mobile apps, we presumed there would be a lot of time spent digging through articles and studies from many sources. That wasn’t the case though because the good folk over at MDG Advertising had done a lot of the work for us in their own infographic about apps versus the mobile web. For anyone curious, the original image can be found here.

MDG looked at the type of tasks that people prefer to do in apps vs the mobile web. Their research has shown that 61% of device users prefer to be informed through mobile apps. Additionally, 69% prefer to connect with others through apps which makes logical sense when we consider the success of apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Instagram.

4. Blog Apps are Already a Thing, They’re Probably the Next Big Thing

So on paper, the research indicates that your readers, and blog readers in general, would prefer to consume data through apps. But have there been any success stories? Sure Facebook and Google have had success with apps, but what about blogs?

You don’t have to look far to find successful blog apps. Two of the most notable in the last few years are Huffington Post’s app and Buzzfeed’s app. Both of these apps have seen in excess of 1’000’000 downloads on the Play Store and a similar number of downloads in Apple’s app store. Buzzfeed’s dedication to their app becomes apparent when you consider the fact that it has been through 8 iterations in the last year!

Its worth noting, that Buzzfeed’s app only counts for 42% of their total mobile traffic, however, their mobile users are more loyal and more engaged. The chart below shows that Buzzfeed readers will spend 24 x more time in the app than on the mobile website!

5. Everyone’s a Winner When It Comes To Blog Apps

At this stage, it was obvious that there was a future in blog apps. But the question of value still had to be addressed. Who benefits from mobile apps dedicated to blogs? Where does the value lie?

For Bloggers

The key benefit that bloggers get from mobile apps is increased customer loyalty. We’ll cover this topic in a Mawla blog post soon but for those interested, Adobe discusses the ways that apps increase loyalty in their article here. Mobile apps also provide a new channel to reach your readers, a facility to engage users through push notifications and detailed analytics about who is reading your blog and how they are interacting with your app. The benefits of push notifications will be covered in a Mawla blog post in the near future. For anyone who wants to find out more about the benefits of push notifications in the mean time — check out this Mobile Marketer articleon the subject.

For Readers

By providing your readers with a dedicated mobile app you are allowing them to consume content in the way they want to. This guarantees that your readers will have the best possible experience. Readers get further benefit from being able access content offline, a generally more personalised experience and easier access to content. The easier access to content is particularly important, it means that readers can stay up to date with your blog with no disconnects in the process — instead of launching a browser, searching for you blog and launching the website, users can access your content with the click of an icon on their device’s home screen.

Conclusion

Based on all of this research, we have come to one conclusion: your blog will benefit from a dedicated app.

The drive from big companies to get customers to consume data through apps is paying off and customers now spend 86% of their time on mobile devices in apps. Mobile apps for blogs make sense and they will become more and more popular in the next few years. The question is no longer “will you embrace apps?”, it is “when will you embrace apps?”

At Mawla, we’re simplifying the way mobile apps are designed and developed for bloggers. Visit us at mawla.io to find out more about what we can do for you.