The Drbnito feature is part of the Drbna’s app. Through this feature, readers can send a tip to the editors about anything that is happening around them directly and easily from their mobile phones or tablets. The function uses asynchronous file uploading and allows you to send various formats of video, images or files, both from the gallery and directly taken via a specific Android or Apple device. The maximum file size is set to 200 Mb which is sufficient.

General evaluation

The collection of tips has started already at the beginning of 2023 with the beta version of Drbnito. The editorial offices have recieved various tips for articles, where most of them are about the topic of charity, traffic, crime or culture. The project management had higher expectations regarding tips focused on political events or causes, which have so far come in smaller numbers. In the next phase, the project management will focus on promoting the project with the aim of getting tips from this area.

The goal of this project is primarily to cover news deserts, i.e. places that large news publishers left mainly for financial reasons, and which are currently not covered by news at all in the Czech Republic. 36.5% of tips came to our newsrooms precisely from these smaller regions, where news coverage is lacking.

As part of marketing, we have used an OOH campaign within selected sports teams which we have marketing cooperation with. We also launched campaign on Spotify, however it unfortunately didn’t work very well. Promotion also took place through a Facebook PPC campaign. We also used our own portals on which we published articles inviting users to send tips.

The project reached the first milestone, which was the complete development and publication of the project, i.e. the launch of the application on Google Play and the App Store. The application is now free to download. The second milestone was the operation of the application and monitoring the fulfillment of KPIs, which were the number of tips sent to the editorial offices and newly registered users. A total of 438 tips for articles were sent to the editors, from which the editors prepared 37 outputs. In the period January – June, 3512 new users registered on our portals, of which 172 used this function. This also fulfilled the second milestone of the project. For registered users, we have also prepared the possibility to send a complete article to the editor, however, this function is already used by several other publishers.

A project of this type has great potential both for us and for the entire market, not only in the Czech Republic, but also around the world. Within our company, we will continue to work with the project and focus mainly on its promotion and motivating users to send tips and open new topics, especially in politic areas.

Challenges

During development and subsequent testing, we mainly faced complications associated with sending larger files, while it was necessary to implement asynchronous file uploads. We also had complications in enabling the upload of files captured on the device, as different devices use different file formats.

Another challenge is promotion itself and motivating users to use Drbnito. For this, it will be necessary to use a larger budget than the project budget allowed. We count on this and look forward to further work with Drbnito.