That was the question Jonny Kaldor, CEO of Pugpig, posed on stage at Arc XP Connect NYC.

After years dominated by platform distribution, algorithmic volatility, and pageview economics, publishers are once again sharpening their focus on direct relationships. In that recalibration, the mobile app is stepping back into the spotlight, not as a companion product, but as a core offering.

On stage with Kaldor were Ariscielle Novicio, CTO & SVP of Product & Digital Strategy of the New York Post, Kathy Colafemina, VP of Program Management of The Boston Globe, and James Cooney, VP of Product Engineering of Condé Nast. Their organizations differ widely in brand, audience, and business model. Yet one theme surfaced repeatedly: apps may represent a smaller slice of total reach, but they consistently deliver the most engaged, most loyal, and often the most valuable users.

Here’s what that shift means for publishers thinking seriously about mobile strategy in 2026 and beyond.

The most engaged audience is already there

Novicio was unequivocal about the value of the New York Post’s app users: “The most engaged users that we have — and we know this from a lot of research and studies — is with our app.”

These readers don’t just visit. They return multiple times a day. “I’m actually really impressed at how often they come,” she added.

Cooney described a similar pattern at Condé Nast. While apps are not the primary scale driver across its portfolio, “they’re the most engaged audience and they’re paying audiences” on key brands. The Vogue app in particular delivers standout engagement levels.

The takeaway isn’t that apps replace the web. The web remains essential for scale and discovery. But when it comes to direct, habitual relationships, the app environment performs differently.

Retention is the core function

When asked whether apps are retention or acquisition tools, Cooney was direct: “It’s a retention tool.” That clarity shapes how success is measured. At Condé Nast, repeat usage over time is a leading signal. If a user becomes a multi-times-per-month visitor into month three, churn likelihood drops significantly.

Retention isn’t measured by downloads alone. Teams look at weekly users, DAU/MAU ratios, and sustained engagement across months. Habituation is the goal.

The Boston Globe’s strategy reinforces this approach. Colafemina explained that the Globe rebuilt its app in 2024 specifically as a retention product. It is embedded into subscriber onboarding immediately after purchase, making the app part of the reader’s daily routine from the start. Today, more than 40% of Globe subscribers access content through the app.

For them, the app is a mechanism for reinforcing loyalty from day one.

From chasing pageviews to building depth

The renewed focus on apps reflects a broader strategic shift.

“In earlier discussions, we were chasing page views,” Novicio said. “Now we still want to maintain scale, but we’re focused on future-proofing the business by building for loyalty and depth.”

That evolution has shifted product priorities within the app experience. Instead of optimizing primarily for raw reach, the team now looks closely at engagement metrics such as daily active sessions per user, repeat visits per day, and screen views per session. As Novicio explained, the focus is on how often people return each day and how deeply they engage once they’re there.

While depth can be more difficult to earn than traffic, it’s also more durable once established.

Monetization is catching up to engagement

Historically, apps were framed primarily as subscription vehicles. Advertising often lagged behind web performance. But that is changing.

At the New York Post, Novicio described plans for premium areas within the app dedicated to direct sales and high-value sponsorships, alongside expanded e-commerce integration. “I’m focused on the CPMs,” she said, underscoring the importance of monetization and her own goal of achieving web and app CPM parity. Investments in data infrastructure are enabling stronger signal delivery across all audience types. “We’re applying that to 100% of the audience that comes to us,” Novicio explained, referencing anonymous, registered, and opted-in users alike.

At Condé Nast, advertising conversations are similarly accelerating. Rather than replicating every piece of web-based ad logic inside native apps, Cooney described a more focused approach: start with advertiser use cases and design purpose-built solutions.

There is also a competitive lens. Internal comparisons increasingly point to app-first platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Advertisers expect immersive, high-quality environments. Publisher apps must meet that experiential standard while preserving editorial integrity.

Exclusivity drives action

While retention remains the primary function, apps can generate acquisition spikes when they host exclusive experiences.

Cooney pointed to Vogue’s app-only Nicki Minaj group chat as an example. The interactive event was accessible solely inside the app and became “one of the biggest single day drivers of downloads and new starts that we had had.”

Exclusivity created urgency and urgency drove downloads.

The lesson isn’t about locking content behind arbitrary walls. It’s about designing experiences that feel inherently mobile, and valuable enough to justify the download.

Competing on experience, not volume

Vertical video and swipe-based storytelling also surfaced as key areas of experimentation. Publishers recognize they cannot match the output scale of social platforms. The objective is different.

“We’re trying to compete in the sexiness of the experience,” Novicio said. “But as far as content, we still truly want to be ourselves.”

That means adopting intuitive interaction patterns — seamless swiping, strong visual storytelling, easy sharing — without sacrificing brand voice.

That is something apps offer that social platforms cannot: full control over the environment, the data, and the relationship.

A strategic reset

So, is this round two of apps?

In many ways, yes. But it is not a repeat of 2010 enthusiasm. It is a more disciplined, data-informed reset.

The web will continue to play a critical role in driving reach, and social platforms will play a role in discovery. What emerged from this conversation, however, is that the app holds a distinct and increasingly strategic position within that ecosystem. As Novicio, Colafemina, and Cooney underscored, the app environment is uniquely suited to cultivating habit, strengthening loyalty, and generating monetizable engagement within a publisher’s own infrastructure.

For publishers shaping their mobile strategy in 2026 and beyond, the conversation has moved forward. The real opportunity lies in building apps with clear purpose, cross-functional alignment, and a long-term view of audience value.

The post Retention over reach: the strategic reset behind publisher apps appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Recent research has demonstrated the extent to which Google Zero is impacting traffic to publishers’ websites. Pew Research Center found that “users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits)”.

Worse still, those users are “more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary”. It is an end to curiosity. And, crucially for news publishers, it is curtailing discovery. That is especially difficult for commodity news sites, which have made advertising served to unknown audiences their priority. Those logged-out users have little incentive to click through to receive exactly the same information, but with more ads served up to them. 

It is already hitting home: over 60% of Gen Z and 50% of millennials are already choosing to use AI – on platforms like ChatGPT – instead of conventional search.

Logging in

It is, at least, validation for the news and information businesses that have prioritized creating a logged-in ecosystem. 

Just as Google is driving the open web with its zero clickthrough approach, the name of the game for those businesses is keeping users within their own ecosystem. External links, attrition of interest, or even just the allure of new types of content elsewhere… these all run the risk of loosening the net and having users slip out.

But those businesses are in the minority. For example, 78% of digital revenue across DCN’s members still comes from advertising. But that revenue is now under threat, as advertisers seek to shift spend to AI-powered search results.

So, media businesses are both grappling with Google Zero and seeking to retain audiences at all times. Are there any silver bullets? 

Unusually for this industry, the answer this time might just be ‘yes’. To a point, at least.

The app, a regular fixture within a media business’ arsenal, might provide the solution to those issues – as long as publishers recognize how audiences use them in 2025.

Multimedia apps

As parts of the industry seek to make the logged-in economy the standard, how far along the path to primacy are news apps?

On the face of it, the initial stats look bleak. Per the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, younger audiences are increasingly unlikely to visit news sites or apps.

These findings build upon research from the previous year’s report, which found that only 22% of news consumers in general identify news websites or apps as their main source of online news. That was down a full 10 percentage points when compared to respondents in 2018.

However, publishers have not been ignorant of that fact. Many have done their best to ameliorate that issue. They have taken note of the fact that audiences are choosing to receive news content in the form of digital video. In order to cater to that – as well as the trend towards vertical video on mobile devices – media companies, including the BBC, have chosen to include vertical video within their apps.

It is part of a wider trend towards making news apps more multimedia-oriented. The thought process is: if AI is making it harder to bring news consumers into the ecosystem, we need to cater to a wider variety of their wants once they are within. That should – in theory – prevent them from leaving.

Sarah Hartman, VP of product at The New York Times, says her team is investing in that multimedia approach: “The app also offers an optimal experience of our audio journalism. We’re increasingly leaning into multimodal UX to give our users more flexibility and control, while always meeting our high standards of craft.”

In the UK, the Observer (formerly Tortoise Media) is making a concerted effort to keep listeners to its in-app audio around once they have finished a podcast episode. Its audience growth editor for podcasts Aleena Augustine explained at the Publisher App Summit 2025 that the app has a dedicated curation team, who manually create a recommendation feed per podcast designed to lead listeners onto another piece of content, whether audio or text.

Speaking at the same event Muj Ali, group product manager of acquisition, retention and apps for the Financial Times, noted that 70% of its subscriber traffic now comes via its app. 

He also stated that there is plenty of headroom to expand its content and audience strategies: “It’s the most engaged channel that we have, but also the most underutilized… but in general, it’s a place that we want to continue to grow.”

Games and growth

While news and information is the bread and butter of a media business’s activity, the need to keep audiences within the app is forcing many to branch out into other areas. Famously, the New York Times has increasingly invested in games precisely because of how “sticky” they make its app. Other titles, including the Telegraph and Guardian in the UK, have emulated that approach as well. 

This shift is backed up by research from Pugpig: apps with games and multimedia more generally have a significantly higher engagement rate than those with news content alone.

That has also been demonstrated outside of the hard news environment. In the UK, Stylist found that audience members who engaged with its puzzles were 68% more likely to read an article that same week.

Additionally, publishers are trying to make the content within their apps more habit-based than incidental: according to the same 2025 Pugpig Media App Report, edition-based news apps outperform their timeline-based equivalents with regards to engagement. It speaks to an opportunity app-based publishers have to zig where the always-available AI search entities zag.

Appointment-based publishing, audio and video, and games are likely to get people to stick around once they are within the app. With AI-powered search, however, the task of getting audiences into a news publishers’ ecosystem remains a difficult one.

Hartman states that, as with all of the NYT’s products, the best use of its app is to highlight the strong journalistic work its team produces: “We’ll likely need to evolve our interfaces to meet changing user expectations around personalization, adaptability, and brevity. But we also believe that the fundamental purpose of our app, providing a direct connection to our journalism served in the best possible way, will continue to be a valuable proposition.”

For news publishers with strong brands and reputations, it might well be possible to stem the tide of Google Zero.

Audiences are becoming more aware of AI-search’s limitations, and publishers can provide context beyond a SERP snippet. Provided those media businesses have invested in making their apps sticky. For, once audiences have landed, the humble app may indeed be a solution to this new problem.

The post Can apps help publishers overcome Google Zero? appeared first on Digital Content Next.

As the cost of producing apps comes down, coupled with the intense competition for attention on platforms, publishers are reconsidering their app-approach.

The intent is different this time, however. Rather than being a vehicle to drive discovery, publishers like the FT with lightweight offering FT Edit, the New York Times’ subscription-only NYT Audio app, and even start-ups like the Baltimore Banner are using their own apps to build deeper relationships with superfans.

New York Magazine is the latest publisher to take another look at apps. They previously launched one in 2013; a replica of the print magazine with interactive features, which was shut down a few years later.

Last month, they announced the launch of a new flagship mobile app. Notably, it includes all six of New York Magazine’s verticals as well: Intelligencer, The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street.

So what made an app an attractive proposition this time around, and what are their primary aims with it? “Over 70% of our readers read on mobile,” Priyanka Arya, SVP of consumer revenue at Vox Media said. “Mobile is the primary point of entry, and the primary reading experience for our subscribers and readers. So we wanted to create the best reading experience for those users.” 

Arya also said that an app was one of the top features requested by subscribers, both through solicited and unsolicited feedback. As a result, the team decided to look at creating a mobile-first experience that would first and foremost serve subscribers. 

Strategy: One app, six titles

The decision to have all six verticals within one app may seem unusual, but it reflects the subscription setup of New York Magazine. Rather than offer standalone subscriptions to each vertical, readers who wish to access Vulture or Curbed instead pay for a New York Magazine subscription which gets them access across all verticals.

Arya  emphasized that having the verticals and the appropriate branding was important rather than pooling articles across the portfolio by topic, for example. 

“We see very different behavior across our audience,” Arya said, explaining why they offered them all in one app. “There’s folks who really go deep into one vertical, there are folks who enjoy multiple and go across our portfolio, and we wanted to create an experience that served both users as well as enhanced discovery for those who may only be single-vertical readers.”

When users enter the app, there are a variety of different experiences they can have. If they’re very focused on one vertical, they can set it as their homepage and tailor the experience. But Arya said that they make an active effort to encourage people to read across the brands with toggle options for quick takes, deep divers and long reads. “We see folks who do read across verticals are among the highest engaged and highest retained,” she noted.

The app therefore also serves as a discovery vehicle for these other brands. Readers may have different levels of familiarity with other verticals when they subscribe. “We see through our newsletter efforts that there may be loyal Vulture readers or The Cut readers who are just going to those home pages, so they’re not experiencing everything that we’re putting in print or we’re putting in some of our other verticals,” Arya pointed out. “But they tend to really enjoy it when they do find [others].”

A premium reading experience

Rather than a bells-and-whistles experience, app users these days seek clean, fast-loading reading. But publishers still have to develop a strategy that differentiates their app experience from web browsing to encourage downloads. 

The New York Magazine app has built in a number of features to offer a premium experience. As noted above, there are convenient toggles between brands, and the ability to set a homepage while easily navigating to other sites. The app also offers personalized notifications so readers can get alerts for what they most care about, and a better ad experience than on browser. 

Perhaps the most compelling proposition of the app is curation. The app includes a ‘Great Stories’ section that pulls together a curation of timely stories and the best pieces from across the portfolio, selected by editors.

“Our feature stories that run in our print magazine and across the portfolio online are among our most popular no matter what interests you may have or vertical affinity you may have,” Arya explained. “That is a place that doesn’t exist on web that can really help you navigate through some of our best pieces and read what our editors are recommending.”

Helping users find the best stories without the help of algorithms is an increasingly appealing prospect. Because personalization was available for push notifications, the team were keen to have somewhere to showcase the best of their editorial across brands, with human curation.

A long-term play

For many publishers, return on investment (ROI) can be a stumbling point for apps. Although they’re cheaper than ever, they do still require upfront investment, often without the promise of short-term, or even medium-term returns.

For Arya, the app is a long-term investment. “What we’re hoping is by getting as many subscribers as we can to download and use the app, we can increase engagement and therefore retention,” she explained. “There’s a pretty lucrative argument around retention, which is always a longer term play, but a much more sustainable play.”

“Our top 20% engaged subscribers have a 30 to 40% higher retention rate than our average subscriber. That’s substantial. So our goal is to continue to move more people into higher engaged tiers.”

Retention increases are far from an overnight task. But a better retention outcome translates to a solid – and more sustainable – revenue outcome in the long term.

Although the New York Magazine  app is primarily a retention  play, Vox has a strategy for encouraging non-subscribers to download the app with the goal of converting them later. Users have to create an account up-front. Then they get a number of free articles before hitting the subscriber wall, similar to the web experience.

“We built the app with our subscribers in mind; a lot of the feature development was looking at those reader habits and building for them,” said Arya. “But we are encouraging readers who aren’t subscribers to download the app, and we do have a strategy to engage them within the app and ideally convert them.” 

Promising early results

At the time of writing, the New York Magazine app is in the top #10 of the Magazines and Newspapers section of the app store. It also has very good ratings and feedback, and requests are already coming in from subscribers for features such as saving and favoriting articles. An Android version of the app is also in the works.

Crucially, Arya sees it as more important than ever that publishers focus on their own properties. “With algorithms changing and platforms constantly changing, betting on your direct traffic and your loyal audience is something that’s been really important to us, and I think should be for other publishers,” she emphasized.

The post 6 verticals in 1 app: inside New York Magazine’s new app strategy appeared first on Digital Content Next.

To rise above the noise, and drive app installs in the process, app owners compete for a top-notch spot in search results. Smart companies are winning the battle with App Store Optimization (ASO) by tweaking keywords, icons and other assets to make sure their app store landing converts. It takes dedication and budget to get ASO right, which is why companies that succeed and boost downloads in one country or store are leaving money on the table if they don’t publish their apps in more places.

But before you go global with your app, double-check that you have mastered more than the ASO basics. The checklist is much longer than it was just a year ago because ASO has evolved, expanding beyond the app store presence and deeper into the funnel. Looking back, the first wave of ASO was a lot like the early days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Companies could score quick wins by hacking Google algorithms or focusing on “long tail” keywords. Moving forward targeting “killer” keywords is not enough. ASO is morphing into what I call AMO (App Marketing Optimization) and ready for a rethink.

Rethinking ASO

ASO/AMO tops the agenda at every stage of the app lifecycle. But it’s never a case of set-it-and-forget-it. It requires app owners to monitor and manage a laundry list of elements that starts with keywords and ends with compelling video clips. It’s an ongoing effort, but the pay-off is massive organic growth that every app owner can afford to tap for their app. The key is to take the right steps in the right order.

It all starts with testing, refreshing and optimizing all of the moving parts of your app (titles, descriptions, icons, screenshots, videos, and reviews) on a regular basis. Once you have the processes in place to achieve positive results for your app at home, it’s time to take your app abroad.

Mobile Games companies need little convincing. They were pioneers in aligning app elements, visuals and gameplay with the preferences of a global audience. Consider Candy Crush, a blockbuster app with audiences in nearly 200 countries thanks to a look-and-feel that is a match with local tastes and trends. Now other categories of apps, notably those in the Entertainment category, are following a similar blueprint to attract and acquire more users.

Localization differs from internationalization

But before you embark on a strategy to take your app global, know the difference between localization and internationalization. Think of internationalization as table stakes. It encompasses what you need to adapt your app to different languages, regions and cultures to reach a global market. Your focus in this stage is on the basics: changing time, dates, region format, and other aspects of your app to fit with your target markets and audience.

Localization goes deeper. It starts with translating the language of the app and other elements (keywords, description, and even the name of the app) to be a tight fit with your target audience. If you plan to engage in commerce, be sure to adapt your app to local regulations and payment methods to avoid any legal battles further down the line.

Clearly, localization is not a job you want to leave to Google translator. Amateur efforts rarely pay dividends, and literal translations can do your app brand more harm than good. (Case in point: KFC’s famous finger lickin’ good motto for its fried chicken is a notable example of a bad translation. In Chinese, it urged consumers to bite their fingers off.) It’s also important to resist the temptation to localize every aspect of your app from the get-go just because you can. It pays to pace yourself.

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, or the countries to target, then start with your app name and keywords and localize these assets for popular countries or languages. As a rule, use your organic app installs as a guide. Pinpointing countries where your app is taking off allows you to prioritize your efforts, starting with keywords. Use tools to check traffic volume for specific keywords and bake the best (yet most relevant) keywords into your app assets.  If you see a bump up in your app downloads, then take it as a sure sign you can move on to localize other assets, such as the app description, followed by other marketing collateral including screenshots.

Cater to local cultures

From here on, industry literature tells us localization is just a matter of “wash, rinse, repeat” for every additional country or app store on your list. But is it really that simple? In a word: no.

An effective strategy to go global with your content goes beyond the pure “science” of ASO/AMO to the “art” of understanding how addressing individual cultural preferences and nuances. Pay close attention to other aspects of your app—such as colors, images and user interface—to build a loyal audience for your content.

Do your homework and use common sense.

Primary design considerations:

UI: Does your audience read left to right or right to left? Or is it vertical? Make sure you factor in how the text and images are read. And make doubly sure the use of directional icons in your app are logical and genuinely helpful. It impacts engagement and dictates how users will interact with their device, especially as they swipe left—or right—depending on the app and activity.

IMAGES & CONTENT: Brush up on ethnology (or hire someone with those skills). Adapt the ethnicity of your visual elements to local culture and pay special attention to skin, hair, and eye color. It’s a no-brainer that Asians or Indians might be wary of buying into localized content that displays blonde-haired, blue-eyed models, presenters, or families. Rethink the obvious icons and idioms. Sure, using a piggy bank icon as a metaphor for saving money works well in North America and much of Europe, but it’s a miss in most Middle Eastern countries.

COLOR: First impressions count, and different colors resonate with different cultures. For example, Japanese players like subtlety and pale, softer colors and shades. Chinese users, on the other hand, prefer vivid, strong and bright colors like red and orange. The mobile games industry learned this the hard way, so deep-dive into posts and publications (such as Pocketgamer.biz) where they share their tips and tricks.

From images to music, be prepared to adapt every aspect of your app to match your target markets.

Pay attention to the political spectrum

Done properly, localization engages your audience with content that resonates because it respects their local customs and cultures, not just language. Significantly, the same rules apply to your choice in app marketing and advertising messages and ad creatives. Sure, it’s a must when you take your app global. But the surprise success of SmartNews, the news app that delivers the top trending stories downloaded by over 25 million readers in over 100 countries, suggests the same approach can boost results and user loyalty in your home market as well.

In the case of SmartNews, it started with the realization that readers in North America were divided by political parties but united around one goal: the desire to access to real news, not fake news. “The most effective way to show we understood our audience and their concerns was to adapt our marketing to appeal to all sides,” Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Head of Global Growth at SmartNews, told me in a recent podcast interview.

A review of app data and demographics revealed that the SmartNews audience was a mirror of American society. “Our readers are mostly between the ages of 35-65, and they range from liberal to moderate conservative in their politics,” Nicolas explained. An effective campaign would have to be objective and emotive. Nicolas, recently named a Mobile Hero for his user acquisition approach and accomplishments, went to work and immediately rejected flashy images and trendy buzzwords. Instead, he worked with his team to develop a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message.

The approach worked, boosting usage and earning the app positive reviews. Nicolas says the results are still coming in and a focus group will provide the inside track on audience and brand impact. In the meantime, internal data shows the focus on eliminating the filter bubble has allowed SmartNews to increase app appeal to both genders at all levels of society and across the complete political spectrum.

You’ve invested time and resource to make your app a hit at home, and it makes business sense to take your app to global in order to maximize exposure. Yes, that starts off with mastering the fundamentals of global and local design considerations to adapt your app to your audience. But we all know that designing a terrific app is not enough given the glut of products in the market and the increasing consumer requirement for apps that are aligned with local tastes and trends. Discovery is a critical component of conversion, but apps have to strike a chord. Moving from simple App Store Optimization to an effective global app marketing strategy will help you maximize your investment so that your app will be popular with audiences everywhere.

The post How to master app store optimization by thinking locally and globally appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Tapping the significant opportunities and tackling the even greater challenges around influencing this massive audience requires a deep understanding of digital content consumption trends and how their evolving media habits make them different from the rest of the population.

This is where Millennials on Millennials, the research program and research report series from global performance management company Nielsen is breaking new ground to offer critical insight into topics that impact Millennials and the media industry as a whole. The inaugural report and the second in the series, released in August by Nielsen’s own Millennial associates, leverage Nielsen audience datasets to shed important light on the “why’s” behind key engagement trends and highlight the ways brands, marketers and content companies can seek connect with this highly coveted demographic.

While the first in the series uncovered hard truths about Millennials (they are glued to their smartphone, they are distracted by multitasking and they are bothered by advertising -unless it is a precursor to accessing free content), the second volume of research reveals hard numbers around their digital media and social media usage.

It’s no secret that Millennials are engaged with digital content during all waking hours of the day and keep their devices close by – and turned on – when they sleep. In fact, Millennials are glued to their smartphones (1,179 minutes each in Q4 2016 on their devices compared to 659 minutes for those aged 35-49).

Socializing

Top of the list, and leading by a massive margin, is communication via social media platforms and apps. Unsurprisingly, these platforms have grown up with Millennials and are now an integral part of the daily routine. While social communication use has plateaued at an extremely high level, growth is getting a boost from Millennials that have broadened the number of services and apps they use. Specifically, 70% of Millennials report using two or more apps for messaging. Notably, Millennials are also 8% more likely than users 35 and older to use messaging apps for group conversations.

Listen Up

Millennials aren’t just connecting in more ways; they are consuming more content across more platforms. Digital music consumption, a topic examined in the report, is witnessing the most significant – and surprising shift.

You would imagine that digital consumption via Internet and apps is reducing Millennials’ appetite for traditional radio tune-in. However, Nielsen has found the opposite is true. The research pegs weekly reach of broadcast radio among Millennials at a whopping 93%. At the same time on-demand streaming is going strong. More than half (60%) of Millennials say they use two or more apps to stream music.

Interestingly, podcasts are also winning over Millennial audiences and a growing share of their attention. Nielsen reports 37% of Millennials listen to podcasts at least once a week, while 13% say they listen every day, compared with 5% of consumers 35 and older who tune in on a regular basis. (Little wonder media companies, including the Washington Post, are scrambling to turn readers into listeners with the help of compelling podcasts that mash up news, analysis and celebrity.)

More Content, More Consumption

The good news: Nielsen confirms the plethora of content offers and options “has actually inspired increased consumption” among Millennials. With so much digital content to choose from Millennials aren’t opting for one or the other; they are consuming all of the above.

The not-so-good-news is that more isn’t always better. “Millennials are an unfocused audience and they are less likely to stay loyal to specific media the way other generations are,” the report states. Millennials may be making more space in their lives for more digital media consumption, but this also increases competition for their attention.

Winning the loyalty of this demographic will be an uphill battle, and winners will be the companies that adapt their offer to the evolving media habits of multitasking Millennials, not seek to limit them.

The post Learning to please the love ‘em and leave ‘em millennial crowd appeared first on Digital Content Next.

NBC News is just the latest in a string of publishers to shift their focus from pushing pageviews to encouraging audience engagement. The emphasis on quality over quantity is part of a larger strategy to avoid commoditization by ensuring differentiation.

Rather than produce more news content, NBC News produces more original content around the news in the form of analysis, narrative, and additional formats including podcast and video. The outcome is less volume – approximately 25% fewer stories a day. However the goal is to deliver more value as this is a take on the news the audience can only get from NBC News. In an interview with Digiday, Nick Ascheim, SVP of Digital at NBC News, recounts the massive “culture shift” that has taken place in the newsroom. In the past, he says, the company was focused on pageviews. “The approach now is, let’s worry a little less about how many clicks and more about telling a good story.”

But it’s not enough to adopt a new mindset; companies must also adjust internal KPIs to measure success and gauge failure. Undeterred by the lack of industry standards or metrics to quantity engagement, NBC News has developed its own, unique formula. It defines a loyal user as one who has visited the site five or more times in two consecutive months. Of course, the way a publisher chooses to define and measure engagement will depend on key variables such as content category, delivery format, audience demographics and, above all, company objectives.

Engagement from the Start

The efforts of publishers like NBC News to set new performance goals and take on the task of internalizing them is a huge step in the right direction. (NBC News has even gone so far as to print the new goals on cards it distributes to writers and employees.) But publishers would also do well to apply the same rigor to how they acquire and engage audiences in the first place.

An obvious place to start is mobile apps, where app companies are learning the hard way that strategies focused on attracting massive numbers of users are fatally flawed. In the early days, the App Economy was a numbers game where data-driven (in my view data-obsessed) approaches worked well. Companies pursued strategies that allowed them to buy app installs at low prices in the belief that it would pay off. It seemed to work, allowing some apps – particularly games and lifestyle apps – to rocket up the app store charts.

But the gold rush mood sobered when a flurry of reports and blogs made the headlines arguing  that app installs, like mayflies, were literally here today and gone tomorrow. Data released by app analytics and attribution companies, highlighted “insane” app unistall rates, adding gasoline to the fire.

The Mother of all Metrics

Today the companies across all app categories and geographies are coming to terms with the realization that engagement is what I like to call “the mother of all metrics.” Indeed, engagement isn’t just the end-game. It matters at every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Finding ways to grow (and measure) engagement is the toughest task that confronts every company with digital assets, not just apps.

Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from app managers as they rethink and retool to identify, acquire, engage, and retain high-quality users from the get-go. Their journey started a few years back with a singular focus on driving traffic. (Sound familiar?) They relied heavily on ASO (App Store Optimization). But their toolbox of capabilities has since expanded and evolved to include direct marketing, social media, influencer outreach, above the line advertising and marketing, and everything in between. All in an effort to forge deeper connections with fewer users.

By way of background, ASO is similar to SEO. Only instead of publishers optimizing elements of their content and websites in an effort to show up high in search engine results, publishers optimize key elements of their app store landing page and presence – such as keywords, icons and videos – to ensure people discover and download their app. That may deliver a high quantity of users, but the success is fleeting if efforts fail to drive lasting loyalty and frequent use of the apps.

Quality Rules

Indeed, ASO has a role to play at every step of the journey. This inclues production, presence, promotion and the pragmatism app developers and companies will need to build a business, not just release an app. For savvy app marketers, ASO has evolved into an approach that encompasses everything neccessary to deliver great content and great experiences via an app. That is what’s required to move the needle on audience engagement and take an app from being simply discoverable to truly engaging. This ensures that the app goes from being a one-time download to a longterm addiction.

For publishers, winning used to be about creating huge volumes of content. For app makers, winning was about buying huge volumes of users. In both businesses the rules have changed, making way for a renewed focus on quality.

In all areas of your business, quality trumps everything. And engagement is emerging the performance metric that matters across the every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Whether you want to attract an audience or grow revenues, quality matters. Strategies aimed at boosting page views or installs may deliver fast — but not sustainable — growth. To achieve that, companies must double-down on efforts to create content and experiences that are genuinely engaging, thus converting an audience of readers into a legion of advocates for the long-term.

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It’s no surprise that mobile device usage is on the rise. On average, American adults own five devices, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, and wearables. In Q4 2016, PC usage totaled an average of 104 minutes per day. That’s slightly less than consumer’s total mobile device usage, which averaged 75 minutes per day on smartphones and 39 minutes per day on tablets (totaling 114 minutes per day).

Mobile apps also drive usage and far exceed mobile web usage. In fact, consumers spent 6.9 billion hours on mobile apps compared to 1.2 billion hours of mobile web usage in December 2016.

Mobile App Usage

Overall, consumers have an average of 89 apps installed on their smartphones and use approximately 25 each week and only eight per day. Fewer than 10% of all apps installed on a smartphone are used daily.

Device sessions:

• 56% of all device sessions are still single-app sessions.
• 19% show at least three distinct apps being used in a single session.
• 9% show at least four distinct apps being used in a single session.
• 5 to 4% of all smartphone sessions are multitasking sessions.

Multitasking Sessions

Consumers are using multiple apps to engage with the external world. External environment apps allow consumers to interact with their environments. This category of apps includes fitness tracking apps, connected home and personal assistant apps, and streaming media apps combined with hardware.

Personal assistant apps (i.e. Amazon’s Alexa) currently make up only 4% of all usage. Verto Analytics predicts these apps will increasingly be incorporated into consumer’s multitasking behavior.

As one would imagine, social media services and messaging apps (such as Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and WhatsApp) are most likely to be a part of a consumer’s multitasking behavior.

Multitasking Likelihood

Interestingly, the report found that the list of apps with the highest total number of returns does not necessarily correlate with the list of apps with the highest return rates (total number of people returning to the same app). The return rate is an important metric. It’s the ratio of multitasking sessions when a given app experiences a return against the total number of sessions of that app within a given time frame.

For example, if a consumer uses the Waze app once a day every day for a month (30 days) and on five of the those occasions, there is multitasking session (the consumer leaves and returns to Waze during the same session), the return rate for Waze is 18% (5/30). Waze, in this instance, had an 18% tendency to attract consumers back to the app during a multitasking session. What we learn from this is that the plays a central-role in a consumer’s session because it is actively used with other apps. Learning about how consumers actively use apps with other apps, often referred to as a smart hub, plays a key role in chart the consumer pathways to best target for frequent interaction and engagement.

Understanding multitasking, the best rate of return, and smart hubs offers insight into important mobile touchpoints. Brands and publishers need to identify and understand these points of interaction and their relationships to drive usage grown, engagement and monetization.

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It’s all about keeping users loyal. App marketers are beginning to understand that the customer-centric rules of online, digital and physical marketing also apply in the App Economy. For example, online a single-digit increase in retention can mean a double- or even triple-digit increase in profits. When it comes to marketing and monetizing apps, the advantages of identifying and inspiring quality users can be just as massive.

App Engagement

AppsFlyer is a platform for mobile attribution and marketing analytics whose tracking technology is found on 98% of the world’s mobile devices. The company regularly undertakes research to analyze best practices and trends. The State Of App Engagement, AppsFlyer’s most comprehensive and ambitious report to date, draws on billions of data points across the second half of 2016 to help app marketers identify quality users who will engage with their app over time.

The report offers marketers a breakdown of key engagement benchmarks by platform, category and region:

• Retention rates
• Average sessions per daily active user
• Cross-funnel conversion rates
• Lifetime engagement

The report focuses on Shopping, Games and Travel apps. However, the overarching observations and trends offer valuable guidance to all app marketers as they seek to optimize their campaigns and target audiences highly likely to engage with their apps over time.

The research confirms that app retention is an elusive goal to reach (findings show only 10-12% of users remain active 7 days after downloading an app, and only 4-5% are still active after 30 days). Yet it also points to positive results that show marketers using data to drive results. Based on a year-over-year comparison the report shows how overall retention has improved in some regions and across some app categories. “The good news for marketers is that retention has mostly improved – especially among non-organic users on both platforms,” observes report author Shani Rosenfelder.

Organic traffic – that is, people who download your app without you having to invest in paid or social promotion to get their attention – is great to have but not the way to drive serious growth. In a marketplace brimming with apps, and where app store search is fatally flawed, marketers can’t rely on WOM to take their app from good to great. For that they need to target non-organic traffic. To do so, they must harness data that will allow them to target audiences that promise high engagement and low wastage of their ad spend.

Among the findings:

Small gap, big opportunities: Average sessions, the number of times a daily active user will engage with your app, used to be vastly different between organic and non-organic users. However, the gap between these two groups of users across platforms is closing fast. Globally, Android organic users come in at 3.81 sessions compared with 3.56 sessions for non-organic users on the platform. That’s a mere 7% difference. On iOS, the gap is slightly wider with organic users outperforming non-organic users by 9%. The report reads this to mean there is “substantial quality to be found among non-organic users.”

Retention rates rocket: When it comes to retention North America has the best Android score across all regions. For organic users the breakdown is 35.8% for Day 1 Retention and 4.1% for Day 30 Retention. Retention rates among non-organic users on Android is 27.3% for Day 1 and 3.5% for Day 30. On iOS retention rates for organic users comes in at 30.6% for Day 1 (26.3% for non-organic users) and 5.1% for Day 30 (3.1% for non-organic users). The report also lists the cities across the U.S. where marketers are highly likely to find high-quality users for their app.

Engagement is encouraging: Overall, organic users of Shopping apps on Android engage in 41.94 content views (for the period studied). Non-organic users engaged in 26.14 content views. (In the case of iOS the content views are 29.46 for organics and 12.14 for non-organics.) Draw a completely plausible parallel between Content Views for shoppers and “News Views” for consumers, and the report gives app marketers at content and media companies good reason to be positive about the results they can achieve. One audience looks at products, the other looks at articles. In both cases, more views mean more chances to engage and retain (or monetize) your audience.

User acquisition campaigns that focus on driving installs are passé. The next wave of activity and excitement is all about finding ways to identify audiences that will interact with your app repeatedly. Marketers need to approach this challenge armed with the critical data they need to optimize their investments. It is essential to understand the key characteristics that separate loyal and quality users from everyone else and target non-organic users who measure up to their organic traffic.

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Interestingly, the smartphone app is the biggest driver of digital media engagement, resulting in an 80% increase in mobile’s share of time spent over the past three years. However, while the mobile app audience spends more time on apps, comparing users of Top 1000 Apps vs. users of Top 1000 Mobile Web Properties, the mobile web audience is almost three times bigger than the app audience. Intriguingly, almost half of all smartphone users do not download any apps. Among the half of smartphone users that do download apps, they average 3.5 downloads per person per month. Industry experts forecast that by 2017, there will be 268 billion apps downloaded.

It’s difficult to build to build a mobile app audience. However, once the app users are engaged, they are an extremely loyal audience. To illustrate this point, app users spend more than three hours per month on the Top 1000 apps on average whereas mobile web visitors spend less than 10 minutes per month on the Top 1000 web properties. Males 18-44 tend to be the heavy app downloaders with approximately 5 new apps each month.

While all demographics are using their smartphones apps more now, persons 55-64 registered the greatest year-over-year increase at 37%. Further, all U.S. consumers, especially persons 18-24, spend the largest share of their web time on smartphone apps except for adults 65-plus, where screen size mostly likely acts as an inhibitor. In contrast, tablet app usage is down across all demographics.

Facebook and Google are a strong hold in the app marketplace; 7 of the Top 25 apps, based on unique visitors, are owned by these two companies. Of the Top 25 apps, the three leading categories, based on unique visitors, are Utilities (9), Social (6) and Entertainment (6 – tied). Facebook, the largest social platform accounts for 76% of all time spent on social apps. App position on smartphone correlates to usage. Not surprisingly, apps with easy access on the home screen showed strong audience reach. Smartphone users spend approximately 45% of their app time on their #1 most used app, and about 73% on of that time of their Top 3 apps.

Mobile devices are consumers’ constant companions. It’s where audiences are spending most of their time online. Since mobile users are spending more time on their apps, it’s important for digital publishers to continue to develop a platform strategy to attract and transition their large web audiences to loyal app users. Further, as the app market continues to expand “smart” device utilization (think loT like exercise trackers, home and car alarm systems, etc.) expands, it will only become more difficult to break through to the consumer’s screen.

The post Why mobile apps are important to a publisher’s digital strategy appeared first on Digital Content Next.

The acquisition of ShopSavvy, one of the largest mobile shopping apps (available on iOS and Android) with more than one million active monthly users and 30 million downloads to date, is the latest move in Purch’s wider push to equip consumers with information as they seek to research, find and buy the products that are best for them. Peggy Anne Salz — mobile analyst, nine-time author and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove — catches up with Phil Barrett, senior VP at Purch, to discuss how publishers can tap mobile to make the most of their assets, grow their audience and — ultimately — bridge the digital realm and the physical world.

Purch focuses on what it calls ‘service-oriented publishing’, first buying titles and websites for the content, and now acquiring ActiveJunky, Consumr and most recently ShopSavvy for the mobile capabilities and apps to deliver content and price comparisons in the ‘mobile moment’. Based on your experience how should publishers use content to drive commerce effectively — and why does it seem that so many publishers have got it so wrong?

A lot of publishers got it wrong because they started out just looking for ways to do the same thing, but on a smaller screen.  They have failed on mobile because they have tried to provide a smaller, bite-size version of what people can already get on other screens — PCs, TV and online. People move around in the real world and in the funnel, and this changes the context of where and how consumers want to get to information. At Purch we’re about helping people as they make complex buying decisions, so we have focused our efforts on building high-utility, single-purpose mobile apps that assist consumers in key activities at key points in the journey. Our customers want to find out something, or they validate what someone just told them or shared with them. Further on in the journey they also want to be sure they are getting the best price when they are standing in the shop and before they make the decision to buy.

Our apps and the experience they offer users fit together to map this journey. There are apps like Consumr, now PurchX, that enable an ‘upper funnel’ type of experience, allowing users to explore products and get information, without an emphasis on commerce. In this app it’s all about user reviews. We’re not pushing a sale; we are basically pushing value by enabling people to connect with each other and get what they need. Our ShopSavvy app, on the other hand, is about commerce. We say it’s ‘pocket to price in 10 seconds’ or ‘all the sales in one place.’  So the consumer journey starts with knowing what you want and getting that information, once that has been validated through reviews and other information, it moves on to making sure you are getting the best price — and that could be a local price, a retail price, or an online price and can include coupons, discount codes or special offers. Some publishers with mobile apps have made the decision to build mega-apps that will be all things to all people, but that is not useful or valuable in a mobile context.  The best apps do one thing really well.

But success in mobile is not just about being able to build and map apps to the user journey. It’s about encouraging users to use the app — and frequently. How do you achieve this?

I think it’s a really good point — and brings me to something else that we haven’t really seen in the publishing space: the idea of emphasizing lifetime value versus RPV.  Publishers I talk to are focused on questions like ‘what is my page yield?’ and ‘what is my RPV or RPU?’ At Purch we frame this differently. In our view, if we can offer value at all points of the customer journey, then they’re far more likely to sign up for our membership program, which is the first step to encouraging and deepening customer engagement to build loyalty.

It starts with the consumer giving me an email address via the app, or it could also be a Facebook login on the website — and what we are able to build is a loyalty platform that both recognizes and rewards our best users. The idea is to recognize users for their engagement — and that could be because they’re active in our Tom’s Hardware forums or rating reviews on PurchX. We’re also incorporating the cashback engine that we acquired from ActiveJunky last year to offer it back to our users so they will be incentivized to come back to us.

It goes back to providing the value I talked about. We are helping users make buying decisions, and we are supporting them throughout the funnel. And now, since we can surface best price or best deal by not only searching for who has the best deal but then offering cashback on top of that, we have a really strong value proposition, a reward program and a reason for consumers to come back to our app often.

Of course, your user experience and rewards will need to be in sync with your audience segments…

Yes. Different audiences respond to different things. For example, our Tech Enthusiast audience is actually motivated more by recognition than rewards, so we are making sure we have the right badging system and the right leader board system. Treating them as our MVPs will encourage them to become advocates for our brand, our service and the value that we offer. As a company we are focusing a lot of our energy on acquiring more members, and that is going to drive our strategy and activities over the next 15 months.

Your family of apps maps to the user journey, but it also attempts to connect the physical and digital worlds to enable real-life commerce. What is the lesson here for publishers seeking to bridge this gap?

Our approach has been to offer valuable content so that consumers sign up for more as part of our program. This allows me to connect with you and say: ‘Hey Peggy, it’s great that you signed up for the program. Did you know that your user ID and password also works on the following apps?’ But it’s not just about encouraging you to use the other apps; it’s also about being able to recognize where you started your journey and surface content, sales deals or whatever based on your profile. Knowing that you came in through Tom’s Hardware means I can make sure your experience — and your context — can be enhanced and extended across the different platforms.

It’s all about solving one of the biggest problems publishers have today: visitor stitching.  Giving the consumer value that motivates them to register and then use their same ID across our ecosystem, provides us insights into how user behavior changes from device to device or channel to channel — and that allows us to get a lot smarter about how we interact with users or shape what we offer them as a service.  Today most publishers struggle with this because a user that starts on a desktop and then moves to a mobile device will look to them like two different users.

What steps should publishers take to deliver an ideal mobile experience — and what should they avoid?

Publishers have to deliver an experience that is low friction and high value. Adapting this for the mobile channel and context means you can’t have a slow loading mobile website or a complex app that takes forever to figure out. Everything has to be intuitive because the context on mobile is different from desktop. It’s critical to focus on delivering the best experience possible, that means putting the user first and demonstrating that you have unique content or unique service your audience can’t get elsewhere.

Demonstrating that value also demands companies communicate effectively and appropriately with consumers. In an age where one-to-many marketing is old-school and conversational content and marketing dictates that communications via the mobile channel should resemble a dialog, not a hard-sell, which channels and approaches do you recommend to publishers — and which have worked best for you?

All touch points are important. But it’s not just about making sure your audience can read the article or review on their smartphone and tablet. It’s also important to have a robust email program and one that isn’t ‘spray and pray’. Publishers have the opportunity to fine-tune the messaging and really personalize the message. This is really low-hanging fruit since email is also one of the cheapest and most effective forms of remarketing. I would advise publishers to make sure their email program is robust and then I would recommend they look to partner with other platforms to extend the reach of their content.

Another important channel for publishers, and where we are also focused, is mobile notifications because they enable companies to deliver a just-in-time message at the right moment and in the right context. For us that means we can send a message that says ‘Hey, the price of that product you were reading about or searching for just dropped’. It’s communication that can get people engaged and further validate the value of your service.

Finally, publishers should make sure all of their touch points are connected and aligned to the same strategy, as opposed to having a separate email team or a separate mobile notification team. Instead, they should make sure capabilities are aligned to give the consumer the choice and the opportunity to select frequency and channels.

On the topic of channels and formats, are there any that have done better than you had expected?

I have been blown away by the success of our QR code scanning app. It was a surprise because QR codes had a pretty bad reputation because marketers kind of ruined it in the very early days with campaigns that just took people to a mobile website or a mobile version of the ad. Being a marketer myself and being one of the early marketers trying to leverage QR codes in the early 2000s I also wrote them off as being dead in North America, but we are seeing huge interest among consumers — and we’re counting 5,000 plus downloads a day, just on the QR code reader. And that is just iOS since we don’t yet have an Android version.

You have created a platform that spans channels and cultivated an app ecosystem that serves partner brands. What are your plans and do you envision opening this up to other publishers?

We are focused on offering this to our core brands first, and will begin rolling it out to them this summer. We have had publishers express some interest, saying it would be amazing since they don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or the resources to build their own app ecosystem, or their own loyalty program, or their own virtual product database. In our own product database we have about 100 million products with 5 years of pricing history which is very unique in the industry. So, our strategy is to offer this to premier partners first and then potentially we could offering this as a platform that other publishers and companies can licence or tap into down the road.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

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