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I have this technology artifact near my desk. It was called the AOL Mobile Communicator, a small blue plastic device for instant messaging and email that was made by Research in Motion (now Blackberry). AOLers, as we called ourselves in the 00s, played with them incessantly. I often made colleagues toss them into an in-box hanging near my office door before a meeting could begin. AOL's 20 million members never had much use for them, so the handheld unit withered away. As FORBES goes about the business of product development, the communicator remains my daily reminder to avoid chasing bright shiny objects.
Five years ago, I kept that relic in my direct line of sight as the iPad craze engulfed the media industry. Nearly every news company tried to win the favor of Steve Jobs by releasing costly apps. For most, the iPad and apps became a second chance to build the digital audiences that escaped them in a Web 1.0 world. More often than not, hundreds of thousands of app downloads produced only tens of thousands of regular users. FORBES decided not to rush in like the others. Instead, we retooled our already big Web business for the era of social media. Digital now represents 70% of our total ad revenue, compared to 20-25% at many traditional media publishers.
Fast forward to 2015 -- and where we're headed with apps. I counted 94 apps on my iPhone 6 this weekend. Being generous, I use six to 10 of them every day, all utilities that help me live my life (weather, Uber, Citymapper) or do my job (Google Analytics, Evernote, Chartbeat). There isn't one single-source news app I use every day or even a few times a week (I do play around quite a bit with news aggregation apps). As it turns out, I'm not alone in my habits. In a new survey of consumers around the world, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism discovered a few interesting things:
1) With all the news apps in the marketplace, consumers in most countries still rely on the mobile browser for news.
2) In the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, consumers downloaded an average 1.5 news apps on their smartphones and 1.6 on tablets.
3) Consumers rely on fewer news sources each week when using a smartphone.
Given these and other usage patterns, FORBES plans to chart its own course for apps, much like we stood apart from the industry with our contributor and native ad platforms five years ago. Last week, we began to roll out the first in a series of vertical apps for passionate communities. At No.8, a hot club in New York City, we held a beta launch party for our Under 30 app. The app is a kind of social network for members of our Under 30 List, with activity feeds, member directories, messaging, notifications and a nifty little Tinder-esque networking feature. The app will be tied to an Under 30 channel on Forbes.com that is set to launch in October. Videos and posts produced by app members within the app will be featured on the Web channel, along with content from staffers and contributors. A second app launch party (again, sponsored by Cadillac) is scheduled for early August in San Francisco, with a full launch at our Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia.
The Under 30 app is only the beginning of a platform of individual community apps that can also connect people across apps -- all under the FORBES umbrella. Looked at from a business perspective, the apps offer our marketing partners targeted opportunities while the Web channels provide related audiences at scale. Both the apps and the channels work nicely with our BrandVoice native ad platform. Now, a marketing partner can participate in an integrated program that includes the Web (desktop and mobile), an app, an event and our magazine, too.
FORBES is focused on the platforms consumers choose to use, which increasingly means mobile. To do that, we need to build new products, tinker with those we have now and make sure our powerful content-creation engine works for smartphone users. Doing new things is never easy, and we will learn along the way. As we aggressively move forward, I'm going to keep my AOL Mobile Communicator close by. There are still lots of bright shiny objects to avoid.
