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The New York Times puts up a reader registration wall, news aggregator TopBuzz creates multi-million spike in pageviews, and more…
Is the time of the aggregator at hand?
News aggregators are not new. Many iterations have come and gone over the past decade, but few have really managed to gain traction besides Flipboard and Apple News, which has a pre-installed advantage.
That all seems to be changing this year. You may not have heard of Toutiao – one of the largest news aggregation apps in China with over 250 million installations – who have set their sights on dominating the international market with their English-language version called TopBuzz.
Between November 2017 and October 2018, TopBuzz grew from 1.8 million to 23 million active monthly users. Should you be questioning its capacity to grow further, parent company ByteDance also happens to be behind one of the fastest-growing apps worldwide: TikTok.
It’s not the only global news aggregator climbing the charts. SmartNews has recently seen annual growth of 145%, and now drives more traffic to publishers in the US than Apple News.
We’re certainly a way off any form of paid news aggregator really making a dent in the market, but readers are warming up to the idea of using one place to access content from a variety of sources, that isn’t their social media feeds.
What’s new this week
The New York Times is the latest publisher to put up a registration wall
The introduction of the registration wall comes just after Google’s release of Chrome 76, which remedied a loophole allowing sites to detect and block people who are browsing in Incognito Mode.
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