Why Quartz now has an app

Valerie Arnould of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers spoke with  Mia Mabanta, director of marketing and revenue products at Quartz, about its revenue strategy.

Here is an excerpt:

WAN-IFRA: You decided late to enter the news app game compared to most media companies. Why launch an app only now? What are the arguments from a user and a monetization point of view?

Mia Mabanta: Quartz has been around since late 2012, and we didn’t launch it as an app. And ever since then, we’ve periodically asked ourselves, ‘Should we create an app?’ And the answer has been ‘no’ most of the time, because news app usage is very low.

If you look at the way people spend time on their phones, only about 2 percent is spent inside news apps. The only way that you can win loyalty from users is to try to end up on their home screen. That’s a very difficult battle for news companies. What has changed recently is the rise of notifications and how when you’re on your phone you can interact with apps outside of the apps themselves. So you get notifications on your lock screen and so forth.

Because of the expanded user experience options, we decided that it was not just a battle for the home screen anymore. There are different ways to interact with users and an opportunity for a news company to use that channel in a more creative way. So that was the idea for the app as a whole, and then very soon into that, we started working on the monetization strategy for it.

Read more here.