By Guest Contributor: Kevin Anderson, App Strategy and Industry Insights Director at Pugpig
February 17th, 2025
Whether you call it the end of the traffic era, the platform era or mass referrals, the firehose of traffic from social media platforms is over. To adjust to this new reality, publishers have shifted from focusing on attracting a large, loosely connected anonymous audience to building deep, resilient relationships with known audiences.
Third-party platforms still play a role in introducing audiences to media brands. However, publishers now want to use that point of awareness as the beginning of a deeper relationship focused on their own products including newsletters, podcasts, sites and apps.
Audiences often start their relationship with a publisher with registration or a free newsletter, and publishers like The Independent are seeing great success in developing deeper, more valuable relationships with audiences through high-engagement products including their app. It has allowed the Indy to double its revenue over the past five years.
Getting audiences to install your app
Apps are attractive to publishers because:
- They engage a younger audience. For a century-old publisher in the UK, 53% of its app audience was under 35 compared to just 38% of its web audience.
- In our 2024 State of Mobile Publishing report, publishers told us apps were second only to newsletters as their most important retention tool.
- App users are much more engaged than web users. The average session duration of the top 25% highest performing publishers’ apps we analyzed was 4.5x higher than the top 100 US news websites and 5.5x higher than the top 100 UK news websites.
Most paying users of a publisher’s app are their existing subscribers, according to our data. Publishers told us that the most effective way to drive downloads is to convert new subscribers into app users during their subscription onboarding process. They should promote the app as a valuable element of their new subscription and include a trackable download link for the app in the message to them.
The second most effective way to increase downloads is to promote your app in editorial newsletters. Your newsletter readers are the kind of highly engaged readers who will get the most out of your app.
Lastly, smart banners are a great tool to drive downloads and remind those who have downloaded the app to use it. They are displayed above mobile web content to prompt users to download your app or direct an existing user to open the content in the app.
Building habits immediately
Once you have convinced a user to download your app, the next 48 hours are critical in retaining them as app users, according to app messaging platform Airship. Almost half (49%) of apps are uninstalled in the first 30 days, and 25% are deleted within the first 24 hours, according to Mindster.
Just as onboarding is a powerful tool to retain new subscribers, app onboarding is essential to help users understand the app, encourage them to opt into push notifications and customise their app experience. We have seen publishers like The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune drive opt-in rates with onboarding screens explaining the value of push notifications and offering users a chance to choose the ones they want to receive. According to OneSignal, in addition to higher push opt-in rates, apps with onboarding messages have 56.25% higher stickiness measured by the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users than apps that don’t.
Getting users to opt into push notifications is the first step to leveraging this important engagement tool. As Eric Ulken, the Vice President of Product at The Baltimore Banner told us for the report: “(Apps are) the only platform that we are able to push, bring people in without having to voluntarily follow a link. Newsletters to an extent, yes, but push notifications are more effective at bringing people back.”
After getting users to opt into push, publishers need to get users to open them. We have found that top-performing apps based on open rates had more than twice the engagement based on articles per user per month than low performers. The top-performing apps had 6x the median of articles per session from users who came from push notifications.
We collaborated with app messaging providers Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly to identify push and messaging best practices. After identifying top performers, we spoke to them to understand how they achieved open rates as high as 10%. The common thread was that they had all used different tactics to improve the targeting of the messages they were sending users. The tactics included:
- ACCA Student Accountant used an Airship scene to survey students and identify those studying for exams.
- City AM uses click-through data from its newsletters to inform the stories they push.
- After The Boston Globe used a preference center to allow their users to choose the topics of the messages they received, open rates increased by up to three times.
Integrating the app into your revenue strategy
Traditionally, publishers have seen apps as a retention tool. Times and Sunday Times app users are 60% less likely to churn, according to Edward Roussel, Head of Digital at the titles. However, as mobile has become the main digital platform for content consumption, publishers are experimenting with apps as subscriber acquisition tools and as part of premium offerings.
Hearst UK developed membership propositions for their titles as part of their digital transformation. For their Men’s Health and Women’s Health titles, they added training programmes and wellness advice from top trainers, which are available exclusively to members via their apps.
“The new apps and enhanced membership offerings will allow us to create even stronger and deeper relationships with existing and new members, whilst building more opportunities for the future with premium content that people want to pay for,”
David Robinson, Chief Customer Officer at Hearst UK.
Apps are powerful tools to engage and retain publishers’ most loyal, paying audiences, and by using these tactics, they can reach their full potential in building deep relationships with audiences that provide a strong foundation for your media business.
Kevin Anderson is the App Strategy and Industry Insights Director at Pugpig. For best practice advice on using push notifications and app messaging to engage new users and keep them engaged, download our latest report.
Join Dominic Easter, Pugpig’s Commercial Director at the Mather Symposium 2025, where he’ll be hosting an insightful conversation on Optimizing Mobile App Strategies: Driving Engagement and Retention.
Be sure to save your spot, register here.
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