Why apps are engagement and retention powerhouses: in conversation with Pugpig's Jonny Kaldor

Speaker A: Hello and, um, welcome to this special Conversations episode of the publisher podcast with Pugpig CEO Jonny Caldor. Pugpig is the leading mobile publishing platform. Is it 400 apps you power now?

Speaker B: 400 M40, I think, at current, and

Speaker A: that's for over 150 publishers globally. And that covers news media, consumer magazines, B2B. They've just released their annual report showing how media apps are performing in 2026. What that data means for publisher strategies, which Jonny's going to get into with me over the course of this episode. Now, Johnny and the pugpig team will be at our Publishers Summit next week on July 8th in London. He's going to be moderating a panel with DMG's Deborah Hediamato and stylists Felicity Thistlethwaite, looking at why apps are engagement powerhouses in the era of inshittification. So if you're planning to attend, you're going to get to discuss some of this with him in person. Publishersummits.com for tickets.

Speaker B: I love that title and actually someone on LinkedIn just gave me creds for it and I'm like, I have to admit that it was your title that I inherited for the session, which is awesome.

Speaker A: Well, I shoved it in the draft and then actually we kind of. Peter and I were like, oh, no, we actually really like that. Let's just stick with it. So if people can't make it to the summit, Johnny, where is the best place to find you, virtually without sounding stalky?

Speaker B: Ooh. Well, pugpig.com is our website and, you know, loads of stuff on there, our reports on there, which is, as you said, the thing that we're going to be covering mostly on the panel.

Speaker A: Got a nice prominent homepage slot.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And infogpig.com we always answer the phone or emails and so on.

Speaker A: So the Pugpig Media App Report 2026, as a bit of a sort of broad brush, what's the industry looking like in terms of apps and why are they something publishers should be taking seriously now?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. The first thing to say is a year isn't such a long time. I mean, it's a very long time in the world of AI and so on. But, uh, when you compare, you know, what does this year look like compared to last year? I think apps serve the same purpose they have done for a long time. I think that probably the difference is that probably, like any technology, 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 where particularly in news media, which is probably about 65%, maybe even, yeah, it's about 65% of our business now. I think there's kind of just a general sense that it's an absolute requirement, the kind of table stakes now, whereas kind of weirdly five years ago we were actually having to justify why people needed to do this. So that's one big difference. And obviously all of this talk about Google zero and referrals falling off a cliff does feel like, and I know you're talking about this a lot next week, it does feel like direct consumer relationships are the most important things right now for publishers beyond obviously getting the licensing deals right. That's kind of a general sense across our publisher portfolio, which you might say is a self fulfilling thing because they choose to do apps. But there's a general sense that this is the number one platform for them now in terms of engagement with the super valuable part of their audience. And actually Fliss, who you mentioned is joining us next week. It's really interesting was having a chat with her last week as we're talking about the upcoming event for Stylus magazine. They've actually switched from web first to app first.

Speaker A: Really?

Speaker B: Yeah. And particularly for consumer magazine brand, I think that's really interesting. I mean, be great to see more publishers doing that. Obviously Mark Thompson did it with the New York Times a number of years ago, but you don't hear it that often. So the fact that we're hearing that more often now I think is really interesting.

Speaker A: I remember talking to the uh, Baltimore Banner last year and they said, well, if you've got a premium subscription, you've got a premium offering. People expect apps as part of that. And he cited Netflix. He was like, you wouldn't get a Netflix subscription and just watch it on the web. He's like, people expect a very smooth app experience if you're paying.

Speaker B: Yeah, they do, they do. And like you say, I mean if you've got a direct relationship with the brand and as we know, lots of news brands, I think Daily mail now say 60% of their traffic is direct, something like that, which is a big number. You can't rely on what someone going to the browser on their mobile phone and tapping in a URL and going to you that way, that's the first thing. Just discovery wise, if you want people to form a habit, you've got to be there on their home screen. And then secondly, like you said, it's got to feel natural and it's got to feel native. Which is almost certainly why Facebook, however many years ago it was, now they tried the whole web app thing, I don't know if you remember, and then they.

Speaker A: I remember it, yeah, yeah, we're not

Speaker B: going to do native apps. And it lasted for what, a few months. And then they realized, you know, Even if it's 5% better than Web, then it's worth doing if that's where you want your audience to be, you know, to be spending all of their time.

Speaker A: I don't know if this has changed recently, but it always used to be a case that people didn't sort of tend to just browse the App Store and you know, oh, I'm just going to download the Economist or the New York Times, that they weren't sort of seen as a discovery mechanism so much as there's something that when you've got a relationship with somebody already, you'll then move them down that funnel. Is that still the case or is that changing a little bit? Because I noticed some people in the report were saying, oh no, we actually use it to acquire audiences.

Speaker B: There's a nuance there. They're using it to acquire subscribers. I think it's absolutely clear. They're terrible at acquiring brand new audience because how on earth would you kind of happen upon an app in that way? So you're right that I think it's still the case that almost everyone who's downloading an app has some prior knowledge of a brand at the very least. Um, but yeah, there's a number of questions we asked in the survey actually around where do publishers see the value? And actually there were a couple of questions I'll come onto in a minute where we asked not only how would you attribute value if you could, how do you actually attribute value? And that was a really interesting question because I think part of the problem here is data. I think, um, these tools, these apps have long been seen as a retention tool, as you were alluding to. And therefore the value is, yes, subscriber retention reducing churn and so on. We're definitely seeing them now as a subscriber, uh, acquisition tool. We're not super sophisticated there. Huh. So, for example, paywall technology is still fairly rudimentary in apps, but actually we're seeing that change now and having more sophisticated paywalls in apps like you see on websites in order to fine tune that kind of acquisition journey. I mean, Apple unlocking the App Store rules obviously helped a lot as well. But when you look at, again, when you look at the numbers. If you just take a broad stroke across our portfolio where I think it's something like 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. So there is this huge audience using these things, getting some sort of value out of them, but not paying any money, not generating any reader revenue. You know, they're generating some ad revenue which is great, but that's clearly a big opportunity to take that group of people and work out how on earth you could kind of drive them up that pyramid up to, from anonymous to known to subscribing to kind of advocate and member and so on.

Speaker A: And that's not a new problem, right? That's something publishers have been doing with web paywalls for ages. Like it's a fairly similar theory.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Again, a lot of these things are self fulfilling. If you only see this thing as a retention tool, you're only going to invest in the retention journeys, you're only going to look at retention data and because the audiences are relatively small in apps, you tend to think that your biggest reward is going to come from web. So let's start with the web, that's where the big funnel is and let's try and convert as many people as possible as we can. I just think now, um, as publicists try to eke out more and more value, the app just seems an obvious place to go. And you know, so people like the independent for example and stylists as I mentioned before, do tend to think a little bit differently and do, and ah, are starting to think about those user journeys and how can you surface enough content to get people hooked but leave enough behind behind the paywall so that the people who really care about the content will hopefully subscribe.

Speaker A: 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.

Speaker B: I can totally believe that you look at the engagement numbers, I mean we think about, I know everyone looks at this slightly differently but we think of four metrics which are really only three but sessions per month, screen views per session, which is the one that, okay, not necessarily the most important one, average session duration and then if you take the first and the third time spent per month, which I think a lot of people care about now, that total time spent and when you look at the total time spent numbers for apps, they do Start to get a bit crazy, you know, I mean, you'll look at some publications and it's on average, on average across their customer base, 700 minutes a month. You know, I mean it's like, and that's, and that's just on average. Then when you start digging into super users, like users who play games, it starts to get a bit silly. It's like a number here. So our top. If you take a top performing app and you look across the users who are playing games in that app, on average, 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.

Speaker A: Gosh, I'd love to see their work performance reviews.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know.

Speaker A: Where does that time come from?

Speaker B: There's one thing that some of these stats belie, which is there are two very distinct audiences. There are the kind of replica audiences, the people who are simply accessing a version of the print products and they tend to spend a very long time. And I think part of that is probably a demographic thing and part of it is a product thing. Whereas as you would expect, the users, uh, who are not kind of so edition focused, they're more like feed focused. They like the kind of the audio and the video and the news feeds and so on. They tend to be, as you would imagine, more frequent, shorter sessions, a very different sort of, um, user experience. But yeah, you get these pockets of just like crazy levels of engagement that you don't see on other platforms.

Speaker A: Now you put replica apps up. I had to bring in replica apps, uh, because I know this is something that DMG have found that they've got their sort of digital feed app and then they're also seeing massive success with this replica app.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Why are replica apps still a thing and why are they so popular?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the replica apps do have a higher proportion of tablet use first than the other apps do, but even so you get to kind of 5050 rather than 80 20. So like a typical app would be 70 or 80% phone, 20, 30% tablet, some of the weeklies, like the kind of news journal weeklies. And um, the replicas definitely do tend to index a little bit more on tablet, but still only, yeah, it's kind of 50 50, that sort of thing. So that renders the reading experience a little bit better. Most of these replicas, they have a PDF element, but you can tap in and have a proper kind of mobile view. It's kind of important also to differentiate between a digital edition and a replica because you can have a sophisticated modern digital edition like the New Yorker, the Economist, the Spectator, uh, New Scientist and so on, which really does fit the form factor. It's mobile. First, it feels very native and what the edition provides is finishability and that kind of engagement type reading which has huge value. It's something certainly people like the weak and the Economist have traded on for many, many. So that feels to me like a very clear use case for an edition which still feels relevant, modern. The replica that you kind of kicked off with on one hand, you could suggest that it feels slightly wrong on a mobile phone to read an enormous page of print shrunk down into this tiny little thing. I think it is a very specific product for a very specific demographic who have come to know a, uh, product and they want to have that product. And I think it's interesting because I think you see trends, both geographic and specific types of news products that lend themselves very, very well to these kind of replicas. So regional news, for example, tends to index more on the replica experience. In Europe, again, it seems to be more of a kind of replica driven experience. And actually in Europe, funny enough, a lot of publishers have two very distinct apps. There's the replica, which has a very specific audience, and then there's the so called mobile app. Even though the replica is also a mobile app which has the kind of, the more, the younger, the more native audience. What we tend to do is most of our publishers put them into a single product. But actually some publishers are very happy to keep them separate and keep it simple. Just like the Daily Mail do. As you mentioned before, maybe not over

Speaker A: the last year because you said that things sort of move slightly slower than that, but since you've been doing the report, are, uh, there changes you've seen in how people are interacting with apps? Are they sort of spending more time, more quality time?

Speaker B: Yeah, we do. And I think that comes hand in hand with these new features. It's funny because we talk about new features like audio, video, vertical video games and stuff. I mean this technology that's been around forever, but I think just, you know, in our industry it just the social media platforms create these new ways of engaging, they create these new story formats and then the industry kind of picks them up in order to respond to that user experience that now has been, you know, people have been trained on, if you like. So it's really interesting actually audio, uh, has become table stakes for our publishers, which I think is awesome. Well, I say that 30% of our publishers have a audio centric user experience now as part of their app.

Speaker A: But from the survey data it really makes a difference to the time spent.

Speaker B: Oh my, uh, gosh, yeah, it really does. It really does. And there's two types of audio consumption. There's the podcast stuff, which I think is brilliant for engagement and does feel like a more differentiated product. And then there's the, you know, the text to speech, read my article thing, which I think, gosh, there are great versions of that and there are, you know, not quite as good versions, I think depending on whether you actually use voice actors, which of course gives you a fantastic experience or you use a really good AI, you know, beyond words have got a really great product, for example, where it genuinely sounds like you're having the article read to you and then you've got some of the other platforms who deliver something that still sort of sounds a little Stephen Hawking like and um, genuinely is not a fantastic product but done well. Something we're seeing that that's actually getting real engagement is this both bulletin do it. Stylists do it. I think foreign affairs do it as well. An increasing number of our publishers are doing it, which is read the top five stories to me and it literally just kind of cues them up and it'll give you. And that's it. I think that's just such a nice, simple time saving feature that people are starting to really engage with. And you know, obviously as we know listening to content and watching content is, it's a less efficient way of consuming content and therefore you by definition spend longer in the app listening to an article than you would do reading it. It's just, you know, we just happen to read faster than people speak. So yes, if I'm listening to five articles, I am kind of by definition to stay longer in the app then had I been reading them. So, you know, that's helped a lot. Games have helped a huge amount. Yes. Funny enough videos, the one I kind of still feels, I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this, but it kind of still feels weirdly nascent in the apps. You can see 22% of our publishers are uh, using video as a kind of as a primary means to deliver content. Obviously everybody's got bits and pieces of video in their articles, but actually having like video hubs and that sort of thing. And I think up until very recently that's been repurposing landscape video that really works on a desktop browser and doesn't tend to be great in an app. But now vertical video. I think two things are happening with vertical video. One, again, social media has trained everybody now on number one, consuming video that way, but also as a news organization creating video for that channel. And Baltimore Banner, who you mentioned earlier, is a good example where they had this vertical video. People were consuming it on TikTok and then saying, well, why can't we get this same content in the app? And so that was the thing that pushed them to actually start doing vertical video properly in the app. And now we've recently delivered quite a nice kind of TikTok style vertical video flippy thing. Yeah, I think we're going to see more publishers now using that to keep people in the app. I think the real challenge with that is actually having enough content to be able to flick through. I mean, TikTok have got gazillion videos and if you're a small news publisher, clearly you're going to have a couple a day if you're lucky.

Speaker A: I can see like, you know, again, places like the New York Times could probably get enough, but, you know, stylists might, might do one or two a week.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think there was something you wanted to chat about. Maybe now is a good time, which was about kind of publishing frequency and what makes sense in apps. Because you've got someone like The Independent with 200, 250 articles a day publishing into an app and then you've got a, you know, a weekly journal or a monthly magazine. The question becomes, you know, how much content is enough to create a habit to get people coming back on a regular basis? It feels like multiple times a day is always going to be reserved for the news publishers. If you're a consumer magazine, you do need to try and get people in at least weekly, at the very least. And so that does require creating content that's going to get people coming back in for sure.

Speaker A: I know last year one of the things you're quite hot on is this idea of utility. And, um, again, I think this is something a lot of publishers struggle a little bit with because not that content doesn't have value, it is obviously incredibly valuable, but it is not maybe necessarily as essential to people's everyday lives as something like Nutra Check, where you sort of. Or, you know, an exercise app that, that creates a fitness routine for you.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is that something you're seeing more publishers looking at, integrating into their apps, that idea of sort of something that you come back to aside from the content? Or are we kind of getting to this point that People are actually maybe seeking quality content because everything else this is sort of ties into this idea. Everything else has just gone down the toilet. So they're kind of almost always seeking premium reading and that in itself becomes a utility.

Speaker B: Do you know, it's an interesting question because isn't it funny? I think the utility conversation a year ago would have been, if you want to maintain a direct relationship with your readers, you need to be able to provide a service which is more than just the content, because, you know, Apple News plus and uh, 100 different aggregators are going to be able to provide the content, actually even your content, and take away your relationship with your reader. So how do you maintain a direct relationship with your most loyal readers with, well, offer them more than just the content. But you're right, we're here a year later and now you're absolutely right, being able to say, no, this is, this is now a trusted source of content. So come to me directly. It's a new value proposition for publishers in order to build those direct relationships. So, yeah, it's definitely changed over the last year with the initiatification of the world. So the utility thing is interesting. I think again, you see it Conde Nast with their Vogue app. You see it with Good Housekeeping, for example. We built, um, the recipe app there, Good Housekeeping Kitchen, the games, of course, form, I guess you could argue that some form of utility. It definitely feels like there are publishers who do and there are publishers who still don't quite feel yet there's a use case for utility for them. It almost feels like news media. The utility is actually just as you say it is, trusted, quality content backed up by a brand that has responsibilities and will stand by the quality of their output. It's almost the magazines, the traditional magazines, who probably need utility a bit more because it's harder for them to differentiate. So you build community around utility, you build community around the product. Community, again, is another, I think, one of those other differentiators. Newsweek is a cool one. So we launched Newsweek a couple of months ago now and they have V4 integrated, so they've got community commenting and so on, and they're building cool audiences around that. So I guess you could argue community as utility is another tool the publishers can use to create this, I guess this place where readers will want to go.

Speaker A: Town square, I think they call it.

Speaker B: Yes, a town square. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker A: But then I see a lot of people talking about community in theory, and I don't see many putting it into practice.

Speaker B: Well, you know, I would have agreed with you a year ago because it was, it's, it's something we've talked about again for years and years and years. And it does feel like over the course of the last year, more and more publishers are. I think maybe part of it is because moderation has become so much easier now with AI, so that the risks involved and the efforts involved are somewhat subdued. You talk to seba, the Spectator about Community. They're very excited about it because if you publish Unherd and Spectator, which are, uh, Seb were to describe it, Spectator somewhat kind of right leaning, unheard, a bit of a mishmash of all sorts of different views and opinions. And they love the idea that their commenting platform becomes a place whereby they can better understand their readers and actually then start to think about what sort of political views drive what sort of habits in terms of content, um, consumption, but also interest in certain brands and so on. So I think Community feels like it's having a little bit of a resurgence.

Speaker A: Good old Internet comments coming back.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah. The lunatics in the bus stop.

Speaker A: You've mentioned games a few times. Um, and I'm quite interested to get into this because again, you think for news publishers that looking to form a daily habit and everybody points to the New York Times.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And there's quite clearly a real use case for your daily puzzle. Even, uh, LinkedIn's figured that one out. I'm really interested in stylists and I hope you're going to get into this a bit on the panel that they've integrated games fairly successfully and they're definitely not a sort of, you know, daily news publisher. So if you're not in news, how can you approach that in a way that I suppose brings people regularly that isn't so sure.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think it would. I think it's fair to say that consumer magazines have had a kind of puzzles and games habit for decades, haven't they?

Speaker A: I think on the back page with the, uh.

Speaker B: Yeah, take a break. You know, what have you. So I. It has been part and parcel of a kind of consumer magazine proposition for a long time. If you think about, well, let's say a stylist reader, just to take that example. I suspect a stylist reader, unlike you and I, doesn't have 50 news apps on their phone and therefore myriad of choices around where they get their puzzles. So if you go into the app, there happens to be something fun to do after you've read an article. I think that's probably already. That already works, you know, because you're faced with this thing, you're sitting on the tube, as you said, and then once you've played the game once, obviously then it's easier to entice you to come back. So I think I feel like the consumer magazines are pretty well placed to be able to offer that sort of thing. And the nice thing about games is they don't have to be proprietary. You know, um, they've just got to kind of work well and be fun and challenge you a little bit and be able to complete it in a few minutes. And that probably ticks most of the box boxes for people we're trying to build. I mean, again, I feel like I'm saying these things as if they're new and yet they've been around forever. But, like, streaks, everybody's, uh, really excited

Speaker A: about newsletters, and that's like one of the oldest technologies on the Internet.

Speaker B: Exactly. But things like streaks, a lot of our customers are talking about that right now. So we're building streaks, obviously, into puzzles. That's an easy way, you know, that's. Sorry. That's an obvious use case. Reading streaks. I don't know whether reading streaks are going to take off or not, but we certainly have a lot of publishers who are really keen on doing okay AI.

Speaker A: I feel like every conversation always has to turn to AI, But I can remember speaking to you last year and you were like, um, oh, you know, people in apps aren't hugely bothered about AI yet. And this year, reading the report, that seems to have shifted quite a lot. So how is AI changing the app landscape? And is it something publishers are, like, looking to incorporate, or is it a case of looking for ways to, uh, incorporate it without necessarily having a use case?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think the big shift is, and probably what I was alluding to last year is most AI tech over the last year has been in the newsroom, and so we were a recipient of that tech, but actually the user experience wasn't changing at all. Yeah. So a year on, I guess there's a few interesting areas in App. One is, uh, Bulletin, which is an offshoot of the Independent, where it's an entirely new app and all of the content is generated from independent articles. So there's no kind of risk of hallucination or anything like that. So the source content is independent articles written today, editorially curated, and then run through Gemini to create bulletin versions of the article. And so you go into Bulletin, you see all the top stories. It's branded bulletin rather than the Independent, Although you know that it's the Independent. You go in, you can read the story in literally 10 seconds because it's five bullets. And then at the bottom, crucially, we of course there's the link to the full article in the Independent. So that's all AI driven. And then the next level, which is quite cool going back to the audio queuing thing, is you can then say, okay, read my top 10 stories or my top 10 sports stories. And now that we have this concept to follow where I can curate my own timelines, then you can also say, you know, read me m my news today, that sort of stuff. So that's a nice, simple kind of, you know, light touch version of AI in apps, driving user experience. The next one is the one I think everyone talks about and it's the one that will genuinely find out whether it's going to work or not, which is the kind of ask the news. So Washington Post have, Ask the Post, Newsweek in our app have an LLM chatbot kind of UI where the LLM is. Well, obviously it's a trained LLM, but in terms of generating answers, it's all kind of ragged on the actual content of, of the source publisher, as you would expect. And so we're seeing more and more interest in that. I think it's hard for us all to know whether that's going to be something that people really love or would rather just be given articles. I don't know. But we are seeing that and it's quite fun. And it's, you know, fun for us as a platform to be able to offer that to, uh, publishers.

Speaker A: I mean, it feels like it's quite sort of not cheap, but it's quite low effort to deploy as well, that sort of thing. Now that's all moving very fast.

Speaker B: It is. I guess the fundamental question is where is my starting point? If my starting point is Claude or GPT, then why would I then go to another app and open something that looks like Claude and GPT? So there's got to be a kind of hierarchy of relationships here. And I guess this is the really interesting thing for news media is how do you ensure you're not disintermediated by the AI platforms? And actually all you become is a licensee of content and someone else owns all of those relationships. That will be a route, obviously, because we're doing the deals right now and people are going to consume publisher content that way. But that has to mean you've got to double down on the other way and actually be a primary interface. And so then I guess if you do achieve that. Yeah, maybe, maybe a kind of chat UI makes sense. I'm more of a kind of. I just, I want to be served the content rather than have to ask for it. But, you know, none of us are typical. So I don't know what the right answer is there. So the third AI thing, well, we've kind of touched on it before, is the content moderation for Community. Again, I think that's probably a game changer just for the practical reason that publishers had to give it up because they just simply couldn't either accept the risk or spend the effort in having to get through all of that.

Speaker A: Interesting. None of those involve personalization.

Speaker B: Oh, sorry, yeah, no fair play there. Is that. Yeah. It's funny because the reason I didn't mention it is again, these are things that for us is an API call. Right, but you're absolutely right. Personalization for us is interesting because the way we work at least is, you know, we hold a token which identifies a user, but we don't really know who a user is. And therefore this sort of stuff for us is upstream. So we absolutely. For example, recirculation. We have a couple of ways of doing recirculation. At the end of an article we can either, uh, based on the data that we have or just based on the content itself, serve up. Uh, here's three more articles you might want to read. Or yes, we can talk to an API hosted by the publisher, which is almost certainly driven by AI, which will be you as this reader. Uh, here are the three articles that you might want to read next. So there's that kind of level of personalization, obviously then turns into your own personal feed. Same sort of thing for us, right? Here's a user, just give us the content that you think they want to read based on what your AI says about them and their preferences or their inherent preferences. And then the other thing we have is this follow function, which is more of the kind of explicit, I'm interested in these things or I'm reading something and I like, okay, I like this, give me more of this. That sort of stuff, yes, is, is becoming quite commonplace now.

Speaker A: I'm a big fan of the explicit with the best one in the world. Some of the things that the Internet thinks infers about me. I had an ad today on LinkedIn for a failed submarine bids. I was like, what about my profile has ever given you any indication I'm interested in submarines?

Speaker B: Maybe that's so random. I'm trying to do serendipity, just throwing something completely random. Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll meet next week.

Speaker B: But, uh, I like the follow thing. I mean, it's a relative new feature for us. But what I like is. And again, if you look at the Newsweek app, this works really well, is when you go into an article, you see the byline, follow the author. Uh, you see the topic, follow the topics. You have to go through some kind of rigmarole of saying, I like these things. But it's just a little. It's a very simple. Can I have more of this, please? And I think that alongside the editorially curated section based product, which I think is so important, I think the two work really nicely, kind of hand in hand.

Speaker A: Yeah. Where do you think the opportunities are in publisher apps? Either in terms of if you've already got one and you're looking for new features or those looking to get into them.

Speaker B: Do you know the biggest opportunity we see is the percentage of your subscribers? For example, let's say you're kind of read a revenue business, the percent of subscribers using the app on a monthly basis and you would be amazed at the breadth of performance across, certainly across our portfolio, where certain titles. And 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. And so you kind of take that data point and then you look at other subscriber businesses where they're closer to 30% and it's like you should be aspiring to 90% of your subscriber base using the app. And if they're not, there's got to be a good reason. Either the app's not good enough or the content isn't good enough, or most likely in our experience, you're not telling people about it often enough.

Speaker A: It's a marketing problem then, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think there's traditionally been a problem as well where you've got, um, you've got a little bit of, well, not conflict, but you know, you've got the two sides of the business going to ad revenue, reader revenue. And because the app tends to be an ad light experience by design, because it's a premium experience and you don't want to be bombarding people with apps versus a website where you've got little, literally nine ads even on the first, you know, on the first page before you even start scrolling. So you talk to a commercial team and quite often there's just this inbuilt fear aversion of sending people away from the website to an app because they think they're going to actually kind of reduce the number of impressions. So I think that that's a genuine issue. And when the two, when the two sides of business come together, it becomes a lot easier to talk about trafficking people into the app. And certainly we have now more and more publishers where they're creating a proper compelling ad experience in the app without making it awful for um, users but still being able to eke out decent amount of value. I mean traditionally there's been a problem because it's a cookie less world. So the data that you can parse with the ad request is not as rich, which means the CPMs can traditionally be a little bit lower. So that's an issue. But if you can get people coming back into the app more often and spending more time, you should be able to account for that. Yeah, so that would be my other, I think that's a big kind of opportunity. So that's one side of it, subscribers not using the app and then the other side of it, we talked about it right at the beginning, which is all of these non subscribers using the app, but actually not generating ever much revenue. That's the other feels like enormous opportunity. So those two things alone I think really interesting and then all the stuff that we've been talking about um, over the last half hour, which is adding um, these features or this content that just naturally brings people back and I think this is going to sound like a bit of a truism but really, really genuinely, the publishers we see really putting effort into their app, uh, spending lots of time with us talking multiple times a week across the organization. It's very clear that those apps perform considerably better than the ones who launch an app and let it flow. So that there has to be an investment for these things to really do well. An investment in the product, an investment in the content and an investment in marketing to drive people to the product. When people do all three, like stylists, like the Spectator, like the Independent, you do see, like the Boston Globe, you see remarkable results.

Speaker A: It's exactly the same thing across podcasts, newsletters, print, like you've got to invest. And ironically again, you know, the metrics across the world are very, very primitive compared to what we see on the web. But if you do invest, those returns are uh, brilliant and sustainable and a long term thing you can invest in. Not this sort of fleeting traffic.

Speaker B: Well, that's right. I mean you Know, you look at the kind of the pyramid of audience. It's, it operates at that very peak of the pyramid. It's a much smaller but much more loyal, highly engaged audience, funnily enough. Um, and m going back to that investment thing, I think the biggest issue we have and our, uh, stakeholders have, that is people in the business who genuinely want to invest in these products is proving the case. It was one of the most interesting questions in the survey actually, which was how important are certain KPIs in understanding the performance of your app? So we had things like retention, new subscriptions, ad impressions, ad unit, cpm. And then the follow up question was how well equipped are you to measure these KPIs? And the difference between the importance of the KPI and ability to measure it was enormous actually. So that's one real issue, is genuinely being able to measure value. The other thing we asked, which I didn't put the responses in the, in the report only because there was no easy way to kind of present the data. So the first question was, how do you as a business attribute value? Is it retention, is it acquisition, is it simply just in app purchases? Which by the way would be crazy because that's a tiny part of the mix in terms of the value that it adds. Is it ad revenue, whatever? And then we said, in an ideal world, if you could measure all of these things, what value do you think you would be attributing to your app? And we asked everybody to give a number and some people gave a number, some people said, I have no idea. Some people say we don't really care. And then the follow up question was, okay, now how much value do you actually attribute to your app and how does that compare to how much you would in an ideal world? And again, these chasms in terms of the difference between what they think they should be able to attribute and what they actually attribute in terms of monetary value illustrates, I think, a real issue, which is if you can't prove the value, how do you get the investment to actually make this thing more valuable? And it's really tricky. So then you end up saying, well, it's a subscriber perk or it retains subscribers. We can't tell you how many subscribers it retains, but we just kind of know that it does. So we're going to invest in it and it would be great to spend some time thinking about that over the course of the next year because obviously if you can prove the business case better, then you can raise more investment in order to make these things Even better. You've only got to look at someone like, I mean, I know we always do, but you look at someone like the New York Times and the amount of investment they put into these products and you see it in the product, I mean, that they are fantastic products. So at least everybody knows what great looks like and how great things can be. It's just then building a case for a given publisher or them having the tools to be able to build their case in order to.

Speaker A: Yeah. Without the NYT's budget.

Speaker B: I know. Well, that's why we exist, you know, that's kind of our whole purpose is to be able to allow people to do these great things, but without having to hire, you know, five developers to do it.

Speaker A: This kind of complicates the last question, but, um, for publishers with apps, what are the markers as success they should focus on? Or they can focus on markers, as

Speaker B: in, yeah, KPIs like things they should be measuring specifically. Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I guess you start with the kind of the leading indicators, the things which are the means to the end, which for us, I think the two big metrics are engagement, and again, back to percent of subscriber base. And the whole purpose of this report actually is to provide benchmarks so that you can get your head around what is good. Because otherwise, how do you know whether 30 sessions a month per user is success or failure? So I think you start with engagement and you choose your metrics. Some people care about frequency recency. We do the four that I mentioned earlier kind of sessions per month, session duration, screen views per session and total time spent per, uh, user per month. And that gives you a really good sense at least of whether the app is doing what it's designed to do in terms of engaging users and creating habit. The second KPI is the one I mentioned before, which would be the percentage of your subscriber base who are using the app on a regular basis. Then beyond that, obviously you can look at ad revenue in the apps. We have some apps, particularly regional apps, who really genuinely drive large amounts of ad revenue. Which way? Way, way overcompensate for the investment in the app. So you can, if you want to make an ad vehicle from absolutely look at ad revenue as well. I think what I wouldn't do, and we have had a publisher once who did this, was their way of valuing the app was literally, how many in app subscriptions do we have in this thing? And to me, that's just completely underestimating what the app should be doing for you as a business.

Speaker A: Thanks so much, Jonny. If you want to download a copy of Pugpig's Day 2026 Media App Report, you can find it on pugpig.com or we'll pop a link to it in the notes of this episode. Like Johnny said, it's got benchmark data on engagement, retention features and user behavior. And there's a publisher survey as well on priorities and challenges, engagement insights and more. So, uh, Jonny, can you give us any sneak previews of your summit panel next week?

Speaker B: Yes. Well, as you said, we've got Fliss, who's head of digital at Stylus Group, and we're got Deborah, who is a senior product manager at the Daily Mail. Two very different businesses, which I think is going to make it really interesting. Specifically, I want to get a sense of what their overarching business strategy is and then specifically how the app contributes to that, because I think that's quite an interesting question. I'm going to ask them about metrics. Actually, both Deborah and Phyllis are very opinionated about, and I mean as a business, uh, opinionated about the metrics of which are important to them. So I want to dig in on that a little bit and also just design decisions that they've made in order to try to create the outcomes that they expect from their apps. I've got one question which I'm looking forward to just about, you know, what does content consumption look like in the next era? Is it still apps? Is it LLMs? Is it something we haven't seen yet? Is it Jony, I've's device and most importantly, importantly, as a news organization, how do you prepare for that when none of us really know what it's going to be?

Speaker A: Gosh, we'll end on a little existential note there. Thanks. Uh, so if you want to be there at the publisher Summit next week, I honestly, at this point I don't know if there are tickets left, but you can check on publishersummits.com uh, and as a reminder, you can find out more about pugpig's work with, I think, what feels like most of the major publishers globally, um, @pugpig.com.

Speaker B: yeah, we're getting there.

Speaker A: Thanks so much, Johnny. And, and we will see you next week.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Esther. This has been fun. I'll see you next week.