The above chart shows the Top 10 News Apps Worldwide in March 2020. News Break was the most downloaded app in the App Store with almost 4 million downloads in March 2020. Over in the Google Play Store, it again took the lead with more than 2 million downloads, reaching about 6 million downloads overall. Following up, Twitter took second place in both stores and overall.

Twitter is known by everybody and their grandmas by now, but News Break managed to climb the charts and get crowned first place in both stores and in overall when combined. So how come it managed to beat the bird app that we all know and scroll through every day. To get an idea lets look at its Campaign Analysis using our Ad Intelligence tool.

Campaign Analysis

news break campaign analysis ios
News Break Campaign Analysis iOS
twitter campaign analysis ios
Twitter Campaign Analysis iOS

When we look at both of the apps’ Campaign Analysis for the App Store, we can see that News Break was more aggressive with ads when compared to Twitter. News Break has a total of 7 ad networks and uses Facebook for the most part, while Twitter has 5 ad networks and chose Mopub as its main ad network. When we go over to the right, we can see insights like publisher count, types of creatives, and the amount of active creatives to the total amount of creatives. We can see that News Break’s both Ad Publisher Count and Creative Count are significantly higher than that of Twitter. This shows us that they’re being more aggressive with ads than Twitter is. 

news break campaign analysis google play store
News Break Campaign Analysis Google Play
twitter campaign analysis google play store
Twitter Campaign Analysis Google Play

We see a similar scenario for Google Play Store too, in Campaign Analysis. Twitter has even less Ad Networks for Google Play Store and again, News Break has 7 and is using Facebook as the main Ad Network. We see again that News Break is more aggressive with both its Creative and Ad Publishers Counts on the Google Play Store too.

How’s Category Rankings?

news break category ranking ios
News Break Category Rankings iOS
twitter category ranking ios
Twitter Category Rankings iOS

Indeed when we look at their Category rankings in the USA where they seem to have a lot of users, we see an increase in rankings for News Break in the month of March, while Twitter’s graph seems more monotone, with no significant change. 

The change in News Break’s category ranking could be due to a number of different reasons, such as their ASO strategy and in-app ad strategy like we have mentioned above. As the world is still fighting a battle against the coronavirus, it might be a good idea for news apps, even the known ones, to consider more advertising.

The download data is sourced from our Ad Intelligence and Market Intelligence product. In addition to download data, our users are able to see Revenue estimations, Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), and Audience Geography. We offer this data as a dashboard in our Market Intelligence Plan.

Interested in learning more or the data we can offer? Schedule a demo with us!