US popular newsbrand People has launched its first app backed by a 65-strong dedicated team at parent company Dotdash Meredith.
The launch of the app comes just over three years after tech publisher Dotdash acquired US magazine giant Meredith for $2.8bn.
CEO Neil Vogel told Press Gazette the People app is like nothing else on the market and will offer readers of the popular news title a completely different experience from its website, social media platforms and existing digital edition.
People has an average weekly print circulation of 1.8 million copies with a further circulation of 700,000 for its digital edition. The showbiz and celebrity-focused title is the tenth biggest English-language news website in the world, according to Similarweb data, with some 200 million visits per month.
Vogel said the user experience for the new app is “very much like what a 23-year-old would expect: swipeable video, colour, motion, sound”. He added: “It functions a lot more like Tiktok than anything anyone’s seen in something like this. It’s really, really different, and it’s really, really awesome.”
He said the feedback from testing has been: “Oh God, now we get it… This is a way to interact with people that is really modern. If you’re into those things, doesn’t matter what age you are, you’re going to love it, but it’s really going to open up a younger audience.”
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Why launch an app?
Asked why DDM has launched an app, rather than focus on creating a better mobile experience for the existing People website, Vogel said: “This is a totally different use case and experience.
“Each article would be represented in this app as a story. It may have five or six screens and swipes, maybe a combination of pictures and videos, motion and other stuff. And then when you’re done with it, ‘let me get to the next one’.
“It very much speaks the language that a big part of our audience speaks, which is different than the website.
“Also we also found when we do new things – we have a big partnership with Apple News, we spent a lot of time on social – it’s all additive. It’s not like the traffic to our website goes down, it goes up. We are up materially since we bought this thing a couple years ago.
“The trap for publishers is to say: ‘Why don’t we just do it on our website and make our website better?’ But you have to do that anyway.
“You’ve got to make the website the best possible thing it could be. But you have to understand that an app, or Snapchat, is totally different media, and you have to be the best at that medium.
“As we’ve been building this thing, we just keep saying to ourselves, take advantage of the medium. Get out of your thinking that says Instagram, or get out of your thinking that says website.”
App is entirely ad-funded
The People app is being sponsored at launch by Gen Z cosmetics brand Elf. The plan is for it to be free to download and completely advertising/sponsored funded. But Vogel said advertising revenue is not the immediate focus.
“When we do new things like this, our objective is: drill for oil, strike oil, tap the well.
“Make something people absolutely love and then you can always respectfully figure out how to make money.
“So there is no three-month revenue goal for this thing. There are future goals. And if we get people really into this and its gets into their daily rotation of apps – which is very, very hard – if we can do that, it will be a great product.
“Our focus now at launch is if we can get this thing to work and we can really get the audience we think we can get, I think how to make money is going to become very obvious.”
Why DDM opted to build rather than buy
DDM has developed the app entirely in-house with a 65-strong team covering everything from technology and design to creating bespoke editorial content.
Asked why they decided to build rather than buy, Vogel said: “We have very unique and special use cases and we think is going to be a really cool asset for us.
“Although we are definitely a publisher, we are a very technically savvy publisher. We have 800 engineers and product people here… so you can’t outsource your core competency.”
The app is part of a wider company strategy that seeks to make DDM less dependent on relationships with outside platforms in order to reach its audience.
Vogel said: “It will be a unique content consumption relationship that is direct with no one in between us, other than their phone.”
Outside tech companies do, however, have huge influence when it comes to controlling the distribution of apps. How does DDM expect to get into the small roster of widely and frequently used smartphone apps?
“If a bunch of people who bought a brand told me they were going to launch an app, I would say that’s a terrible idea. But they don’t have 10 million visitors to a website every day, they don’t have millions and millions of followers on social, they don’t have audiences on Apple News and Youtube, and they don’t have a print magazine that goes to two and a half million people per week.
“So if we didn’t have that, the math and the equation for acquiring users for this app would be very different.”
DDM has consistently grown revenue and profit over the last four quarters.
Speaking at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network conference in New York last month, Vogel said: “This narrative that media cannot work in the modern era is totally wrong, and it’s told by people that either a) are sentimental, which is the enemy of everything, or b) have bad business models. And they’re confusing bad business models with an industry that can’t work.”
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