February 13, 2014
One hundred days after ABC News launched its revamped application, the corporate is seeing tremendous growth in mobile video viewing.
ABC has gained some interesting insight on its users, akin to the truth that most users view videos between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ABC News plans on taking such information into consideration when determining what content to supply via the app and the way to best deliver it.
“We’ve seen some pretty incredible growth in mobile video during the last few years on our Web properties, and we would have liked to deliver an app experience which can help us further that growth,” said Doug Vance, vp of product at ABC News, Ny.
“We’re incredibly pleased with the early results,” he said. “One thing that has surprised us slightly have been the incredible success of live video within the app. We put them front and center, but our users are watching more live video than we even expected.
“After we launched the app there has been this shooting at LAX and when that incident broke we broadcasted out the frenzy alerts and had great live video coverage and consequently we saw five times more live video streams on phone apps than on our desktop site in order that was the primary time we’d seen the sort of marked difference.”
Mobile video
ABC News launched its new iPhone and Android app in Oct. 2013 and has already been seeing successful results.
In Nov. 2013, year-over-year monthly mobile unique users increased by 165 percent, and total mobile video views were also up 87 percent.
By analyzing user behavior, ABC News was ready to obtain valuable insight at the app. To illustrate, New Year’s Eve Around the globe was the most well liked live stream through Apple AirPlay.
Additionally, the foremost watched live streams were the LAX shooting coverage, Metro North train derailment and Chris Christie scandal press conference.
ABC News also found that two-thirds of video is watched with the recent “Watch and read” feature that lets users multitask and consider videos while reading the related article while.
According to Mr. Vance, users were watching more video around the board, be it live video, “Watch and read” or a feature called “Daily Rewind.” The last feature provides a video-centric catchup experience around 8 p.m. in a user’s local time.
Another interesting finding is that 60 percent of the users are on iPhones and 40 percent Android. The preferred devices are the Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3.
Push alerts
Besides for a large push for mobile video, ABC’s new app also highlighted a brand new push alert system. In keeping with ABC News, greater than 1/2 its users leverage personalized push alerts and the tale inbox.
Additionally, app users have starred greater than half one million stories, with the foremost shared categories being tech, health, business and politics.
“We initiated a user research program, and we found that our users had this love-hate relationship with push alerts on their phones,” Mr. Vance said. “They love them when they’re personalized relevant actionable but if they feel more spammy or overly promotional they’re really disruptive.
“We’re seeing really strong usage of the customised push system,” he said. “It empowers our users to customise their very own ABC inbox.
“As you utilize the app more and express your interest in certain topics, your inbox may be packed with text, photos of what you’re drawn to . We’ve seen great initial results, and we’re how you can blow that out even further.”
Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York