Trend 2: Loyalty over downloads

I spoke to Newman a few days before it emerged that Apple had changed its App Store rankings to factor in active usage of apps rather than pure download numbers. He was already thinking along these lines though, after Google had made a similar change in the weeks before the interview.

“There is a move from an obsession about downloads to an obsession about loyalty,” he said. “Android changed their rankings to include an element of stickiness, and I’m sure Apple will follow suit. So for a lot of guys we do apps for, the questions are becoming how do they promote re-use, create loyalty and run CRM campaigns?”

Newman sees these app store changes having a big impact on how magazine and newspaper teams view their apps, particularly when it comes to moving away from the brand essence of a title being a monthly or weekly publication.

“People don’t want to turn their magazine into the web or a newspaper – that is fundamentally wrong – but what if people could choose to follow a story in the magazine throughout the week after it was first published?” says Newman.

“Think of an article on the BP oil spill, where you can follow the story as it develops through an infographic, which lets you know how the story is developing. A lot of stories can fit into this idea, as well as bringing in the different opinions about a story that people are having.”

That brings us onto the addition of social features to these kinds of apps – helping readers to see “what people are saying about these stories out there in the world” in Newman’s words. The key challenge is how publishers can make sense of the mass of tweets, status updates and comments around any given story.

“Consumers do not just want a continuous stream, they want to be helped to place a filter over the information. So what kind of filter can we place,” he says, stressing that it’s early days.