The new Toronto Star Touch app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since its Sept. 15 debut, with publisher John Cruickshank saying time spent reading with the app is already three times greater than the company’s previous tablet product.
The Toronto daily has a stated goal of attracting 180,000 downloads by the end of 2016. The product underwent a subtle name change shortly after its launch, with the word “Toronto” added to the product description.
In a note to readers on Saturday, Cruickshank also said downloaders of the free app tend to be “much younger” than the readers the newspaper currently attracts. “This is tremendously important to us as the business model for news changes,” said Cruickshank.
When Toronto Star Touch launched in September, Cruickshank told Marketing it would have the ability to engage readers 25-55, with a key audience of readers in their 30s.
Toronto Star Touch uses technology from the free La Presse+ app, which reaches 450,000 weekly readers while accounting for more than one third of the Quebec daily’s revenues.
Cruickshank described the Toronto Star as a “lonely media bastion” of progressive and constructive thought, and said its survival is crucial to bringing its focus on social justice and political accountability to future generations.
Despite the success of products like Toronto Star Touch, however, publishers are discovering there is still some tinkering required for newspaper tablet editions. Last month, for example, Postmedia Network quietly discontinued the evening tablet editions for its “Reimagined” products in Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary, citing a lack of reader and advertiser support.
“We just weren’t able to build a critical mass of audience for our advertisers around the [product],” said Cole Reiken, vice-president of digital businesses at Postmedia Network in Toronto. “The idea behind it was that we’d produce an evening edition that would be a 20-30 minute read every evening, where you could lean back with that content, but we just weren’t able to generate a sizeable audience.”
Postmedia did not include the evening product with subsequent iterations of the “Reimagined” product in Edmonton and Windsor, nor will it be included when the Regina Leader Post and Saskatoon Star Phoenix introduce their multi-platform products this month.
The company plans to complete the rollout of its “Reimagined” product next year, though Reiken said there are no concrete plans to bring it to the Sun Media chain of dailies it acquired this year.
“It’s all being looked at right now,” he said. “We don’t have a plan or a timeline in place at this moment, but it’s all under investigation.”
