The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices

The episode contains a handful of genuinely useful data points - app engagement benchmarks, paywall penetration stats, subscriber usage rates - but they are surrounded by substantial event promotion, meandering conversation, and generic publishing wisdom ('you've got to invest'). The insight-per-minute rate is moderate at best.

“92% of our publishers have a paywall, right. So they tend not to be free apps and yet about 50% of the users in these apps are non subscribers”

“the difference between the importance of the KPI and ability to measure it was enormous actually”

Almost all the frameworks here - apps as retention tools, the NYT as the gold standard, 'you need to invest' - are well-worn publishing industry talking points. The observation that 'trusted content' has replaced 'utility' as the direct-relationship value proposition is a mild reframe, but nothing is genuinely contrarian or first-principles.

“apps serve the same purpose they have done for a long time”

“we've been through the kind of all of that excitement, then the value of despair, and now I think we're genuinely getting back to a sense of maturity”

Kaldor is a genuine practitioner with a real portfolio of 400+ apps and proprietary benchmark data, which gives him credible authority to speak on engagement and monetisation patterns. However, he is also clearly running a vendor marketing exercise tied to a product report, which colours the neutrality and depth of his claims.

“we think of four metrics which are really only three but sessions per month, screen views per session...average session duration and then if you take the first and the third time spent per month”

“Seb won't mind me mentioning this because he said it publicly, the Spectator, they're nigh on 90% of their subscriber base using the app every month”

There are named publishers, concrete percentages, and time-spent figures that a publisher operator could actually benchmark against, which is above average for the genre. However, several numbers are hedged ('something like,' 'about,' 'nigh on') and all data originates from Pugpig's own self-published report, limiting independence.

“they're up to 1700 minutes a month for that user cohort, on average in a top performing app. And even the median at that point is somewhere around 750”

“Daily mail now say 60% of their traffic is direct”

The host asks competent topical questions and earns credit for catching Kaldor's omission of personalisation mid-answer and redirecting him to it. However, there is no real pushback on vendor-favourable claims, the opening and closing are heavily promotional, and most questions are set-up softballs rather than probing challenges.

“Interesting. None of those involve personalization.”

“I'm sure the FT said that at our summit last year that even registered app users are four times more engaged when they're on the app versus when they're not on the app.”