Doing the numbers on Fango — Televised Revolution
The 7 Network driven social media check-in app Fango launched in Nov 2011. A media release sent out today by Yahoo7 informs us that:
- Overall since launch FANGO has secured over 1.2 million check-ins
- Fango has had 537,000 downloads
- 62 percent of show ‘check-ins’ are during prime time shows — 7pm to 11pm
- In August 2012, 50,604 FANGO polls were completed and 93,753 trivia questions answered
From that, we know the following:
- On average, Fango users have used the platform to check in to programs 2.23 times each.
- With only 62% of check-ins happening in prime time, it indicates that a large segment of the audience of Fango are students, stay at home adults (re: parents or the unemployed), or people that work unusual hours. Or they happen over weekends.
- On average, in August users answered 10.61 Fango polls and 5.73 trivia questions.
- All of these statistics are meaningless.
Let us focus on that last fact: All these statistics are meaningless.
Get Dan Barrett’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
537,000 downloads of an app is not a significant number. Yes, it’s a good download rate, but if I were to advertise on the platform, I’d want to know just how many people are regularly engaged with the platform as well as how many casually check it out. From my own experience and from anecdotal evidence, most people who’ve downloaded Fango haven’t logged in following the initial experience of downloading it. From my own perspective, I’ve downloaded the app approximately 5–10 times to check in on its evolution as a platform and to see how the app looks on different devices I own. With 1 million iPads sold in Australia during 2011 alone and add to that people upgrading their devices, it is worth considering just how many others have re-downloaded the app over the past 10+ months.
If there are relatively few people are actively using Fango (and its worth noting that we don’t know how many people do, we simply know how many times it has been downloaded), they’re actually attracting strong user engagement by those that are using it with regulariy. But, how many people is that? Is it 50,000 moderately engaged people that check into several shows a week? Is it 2,000 super obsessed Fango devotees? They certainly seem to be answering a whole lot of quiz questions and answering polls. So many that it possibly puts large-scale quiz/polling sites like OKCupid to shame. The numbers do seem a little high….
What is most fascinating to me is who and when people are using the apps. With only 62% of program check-ins happening during prime time, it suggests that a large number of Fango users are students who happen to be home during daytime hours, mothers/fathers who are stay at home parents, the elderly, or people who work unusual hours. It is quite possible that the 38% of check-ins actually take place on weekends and consist of people checking in during sporting events. And that makes sense with the Fango launch supported by advertising during the Australian Open. But if that is the case, why is Seven not actively promoting the strong sport audience engagement of the platform?
The stats promoted to the media by Yahoo7 regarding Fango are lacking in context. Without that context, they’re meaningless.
