This article summarises the session given by Mathias Douchet, Chief Product Officer at The Telegraph, during the Audiencers' Festival in Paris on 16th September 2025. The slides from his presentation can be downloaded at the end of the article.

The Telegraph app in a few words: 
-> Freemium model: a selection of free articles, the rest is reserved for subscribers
-> A 14-day free trial is offered to new app users
-> App usage has increased by 15% in a year
-> 8 more sessions each week vs web
-> 6 percentage points higher 30-day retention vs web

Changes in reader habits mean that we must also evolve.

Three quarters of the Guardian’s digital readers now access our journalism daily via mobile devices. Our premium news app, which prompts users to subscribe after reading a set number of articles, attracts one million daily users and has become the second biggest revenue driver for the Guardian. And while this model is working, growth relies on two things:

1. Generating new installs and converting casual mobile web users into app users
2. Increasing frequency and loyalty for existing users

To respond to this, in May 2025, we went to market with a relaunched Guardian News app, with new features and a major redesign. Here are the three main areas we improved on:  

Discovery & Personalisation – Your News, Your Way

In an era of news overwhelm, it’s important to give users the ability to craft a feed of topics and stories they want to read quickly and easily without the need for endless scrolling. We learned that Guardian readers still love curation and are resistant to the notion of having an algorithmic feed.

In response, we created ‘My Guardian’ – a section of the app focused on personal curation, with a more intuitive set up experience. We made it easier to switch between topics, and changed the UI to make it more resemble a social media feed. We also redesigned our homepage to have more curated highlights, aiding discoverability and breadth and depth of reading. 

It would’ve been easy to assume My Guardian was a way of avoiding news you don’t want to read – but we know from research that Guardian readers don’t want to live in echo chambers. So instead, our marketing focused on the choice and diversity of topics you can follow. 

Audio experiences

Our data suggested two key bits of insight: our app is heavily used in the mornings, and our readers find it hard to consume long form journalism when life responsibilities are keeping their hands busy.

Now that podcasts are a well established form of media consumption, and data suggesting this is only rising, we brought generative voice to the app. Now every article can be listened to, not just read. And we introduced a new dedicated Audio tab, putting podcasts and longform reads front and centre, particularly valuable for morning users on the move. 

Whilst text-to-voice and podcasts aren’t new to the industry, our goal was to provide accessibility and flexibility to how users consume journalism. We’ve had a 34% uplift in podcast listens, and we can now piggy back onto the podcast launch calendar – particularly useful for App Store promotion.

Upgrading Downtime

We know the news is overwhelming, and we wanted to provide readers with a reason to use our app in those moments of downtime that doesn’t involve news. That’s why we introduced the Puzzles hub. 

The hub contains daily puzzles that readers can engage with in a fun and challenging activity, including crosswords, sudoku, Wordiply and Word wheel – with more to come in the very near future. 

Suddenly, we have a completely new dimension to how we market the Guardian app, and target new audiences. We will be targeting a full Puzzles campaign later this year (more on this soon!). We’ve gone from thousands of page views to millions almost overnight and I’m very excited about the future from here.

For a Product Marketer, it’s important to remember 4 fundamental things with a go-to-market launch:

Work hand in glove with your product team. Join their meetings, learn their language, build those relationships and foundations. Essentially, become one team – believe in each other’s mission. It makes working together a breeze, and you understand the product from a different perspective.

Audience research is crucial to understanding the customer problem and solution –  their pain points and gains, what makes them install and subscribe? Don’t make assumptions – getting into the minds of your users or readers is invaluable. It helps you develop your messaging and creative approach and stay true to the customer’s needs. 

Have clear creative principles and goals but challenge yourself, too. We had fun leveraging our brand’s more playful assets (e.g. illustrations), avoided cliches in our creative work (like hands holding phones), and leveraging UI in our creative. Everyone’s approach will be different!

Translate your existing customer insight and product research into a value proposition and positioning framework that you can launch into market with – and build on over time as your product develops.

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Shout out to Nazeerah Makda, Daniel Bhattacharya, Paul Heron and the entire Apps Experience team at the Guardian for an amazing launch.

You’ll find data on what proportion of subscribers typically use the app, how engagement metrics shift when features like audio, video and games are included, how engagement differs between edition-led and timeline-first apps, and the impact of user type, from anonymous browsers to subscribers. 

Here are a handful of the biggest takeaways from the report, valuable for any media company getting to grips with their app strategy and wanting to build stronger, direct relationships with their audience.

Publishers are focusing on direct reader relationships…

Building direct relationships with audiences is becoming increasingly important – publishers are shifting their focus from chasing scale to targeting smaller but more loyal and valuable audiences, developing stronger relationships with readers free from the influence of third parties. With apps consistently delivering higher engagement than websites, they have become a critical component of audience development strategies.

… and engagement is the key to making the strategy work

It’s been well understood for some time now that an app that simply regurgitates content from the printed page will never reach its full potential. For an app to succeed with audiences beyond an aging group of print subscribers on iPads, you have to put the effort in to create something that truly exploits the capabilities of mobile devices and gives users the experience they expect from a modern media organisation.

Apps including richer content formats show significantly stronger engagement across all metrics – in fact, almost 50% of publisher apps now offer audio as standard. Features like video, games and utilities are playing an increasingly important role in driving deeper, more habitual use. And even though these features are sometimes used by a relatively small (but growing) proportion of users, those who do tend to return repeatedly and for long periods.

For instance, users who play games, on average play 37 games per month and max out at over 100. For one publisher included in the report, puzzle users read 31% more articles per session and 69% more articles a week.

There’s untapped potential here for all publishers, either in adding these features to your apps and/or making them more visible to users. 

There’s growing enthusiasm for user-curated and AI-personalised reading experiences

Personalisation is the top innovation priority for 2025, with particular focus on tailoring home screens, content recommendations and push notifications. Still, only half of publishers have implemented any form of it. Many are testing AI-driven recommendations, personalised home screens, and segmented push – but others are taking a user-curated approach.

One publisher said: “Personalisation at scale often feels hollow. We prefer to give readers helpful tools for discovery so they can find what interests them on their own terms.”

That quote reflects a common tension. News publishers, in particular, are excited about AI’s ability to filter large volumes of content, but they also recognise the value of editorial curation and user-driven control.

We believe that the most successful apps will combine both, providing a balanced, compelling experience.

The new way of selling subscriptions in the US is worth exploring, but must be evaluated carefully 

In recent months, the US court has ruled that Apple can no longer stop developers from directing users to pay outside the App Store. The ruling states Apple can no longer interfere with or take a commission from external purchases made by US users.

There’s now much more flexibility in how publisher apps offer subscriptions in US apps and this means publishers can send American users to external sites to subscribe, avoiding Apple’s cut and allowing them to own the subscriber relationship directly. It also means that these flows are considerably smoother than they have been in the past.

However, there are tradeoffs. External flows introduce friction – users effectively have to make a purchase through mobile web pages, which are less smooth than in-app purchases which still offer seamless access, promos and pricing options.

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You can download the full report here.

Why publishers should use push notifications

In working with publishers to increase engagement with their apps, we knew push notifications were a powerful tool. After one publisher started using them, they saw a 60% increase in active users over three months.   The 2024 State of Mobile Publishing Report revealed that publishing brands that successfully optimize mobile app push notifications had more than twice as high audience engagement. 

We wanted to uncover tactics that could elevate the performance of more publishers, so we dug into data from more than 350 media apps built by Pugpig. We also partnered with Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly to get further insights from thousands of apps and billions of users around the world. 

As Eric Ulken, Vice President of Product at the Baltimore Banner told us for the report: “(Apps are) the only platform that we are able to push, bring people in without having to voluntarily follow a link. Newsletters to an extent, yes, but push notifications are more effective at bringing people back.”

This led us to ask what drove the performance of the most successful publishers. We also wanted to answer the question from some publishers who were worried that using push notifications would not only drive users to opt out of push but also delete the app. 

In truth, we did find one specific use of push that drove up app uninstalls: If a publisher sent push messages linked to gated content to nonsubscribers, churn increased. 

Apart from this churn-inducing use case, we haven’t found evidence that push notifications drive uninstalls. 

Build habits immediately

Airship has found more risk in not using, compared to using, push notifications. While app audiences are typically publishers’ most loyal users, they can’t take that for granted. Airship’s data shows the first 48 hours are critical in building habits that keep new users engaged with the app. 

App onboarding screens that include prompts to encourage users to opt into push notifications, customise the app and provide information on how to use it are key. Successful publishers such as Boston Globe and Minnesota Star Tribune have onboarding screens or pop-ups that ask users to opt into and customise push notifications the first time they open the app. 

According to OneSignal, in addition to higher push opt-in rates, apps with onboarding messages have 56.25% higher stickiness measured by the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users than apps that don’t. 

Messaging providers have found in their research that the most successful app onboarding sequences use multiple forms of messaging including email, push notifications and in-app messages. Notably, publishers should increase their adoption of in-app messaging because it doesn’t require app users to opt in, unlike push notifications. Plus, using multiple communications channels increases engagement by 37%, leading to higher 1-day, 7-day and 30-day app retention, OneSignal has found. 

Relevance is the key driver of push performance

We used data from the messaging providers to identify the most successful publishers using our app platform based on push notification open rates. Airship has found that personalisation boosts open rates by 37% on average. When we reached out to the best-performing publishers, we found the common thread between them was that they employed different methods to increase the relevance of their messaging, although they employed different tactics. 

• ACCA Student Accountant used an Airship scene to allow students to identify if they are currently studying for an exam. 
• City AM uses content strategy and click-through data from its newsletters to inform the stories they push. 

• The Boston Globe started allowing users to choose which push notifications they received using a preference centre. Open rates increased by up to three times. 

Their success in using relevance to drive higher push notification open rates has led to higher engagement and growth in their app audience. The Boston Globe has been so successful in increasing their app audience that they dedicated a staff member to focus on optimising their app even more. 

While we started this research looking to investigate push notification best practices, it quickly became obvious that publishers have several other app messaging opportunities to foster loyalty and habit with their apps such as Apple’s Live Activities. You might be familiar with them from delivery, ride-sharing or navigation apps when the app presents constantly updated information on the lock screen. News publishers have used these to show live updates of sports events and elections. As with other app messaging options, Live Activities have been shown to increase engagement. 

• Sports apps featuring live activities have 3.7x more sessions than those without them, according to Airship. 
• Across all types of apps, OneSignal found that apps that use them have a 23.7% higher retention rate. 

Google plans to add a similar feature in Android, which it calls Ongoing Notifications. The feature is planned for Android 16, which is scheduled to be released in the second quarter of 2025. 

The report contains more details about the case studies as well as benchmarks and best practices about: 

• The best time to send push notifications
• The ideal length of push notifications
• The best size for images in push notifications.  

You can download the full report to get all of the insights about how to use app messaging to achieve your app engagement, retention and growth goals. 

The Audiencers' Festival at The New York Times Building on March 15th brought together 150 digital publishing professionals to discuss everything from audience research to newsletters, engaging young audiences and maximizing on the value of registration.

To kick the day off, Gina Bulla, Executive Director Audience Research, and Mariah Craddick, Executive Director Product, shared how The Atlantic is using audience research to bring more value to readers and subscribers, with the example of their mobile app development.

> To add to your reading list: Audience research at The Atlantic, the questions that data can’t answer

Gina sees her work in audience research as falling into 4 buckets:

• Listen – keeping an eye on social media comments, care team feedback, reviews… you can learn a lot without ever asking a question
• Connect – directly connecting with audience via zoom to get feedback
• Educate – sharing learnings with the entire organization
• Advocate with balance – advocating for the audience whilst also bearing in mind that a lot of things go into a business decision

Audience research guiding principals:

• Seek out multiple perspectives – talk to people with different backgrounds and with different relationships with The Atlantic. For instance, not only super fans but also casual readers or those who don’t yet know or like The Atlantic
• Respect readers – being thoughtful about reaching out to readers, ensuring they understand why they’re being asked questions
• Interpret without bias – much of this research is qualitative, so ensuring they go in without preconceived bias, etc.
• Tell the truth – don’t only share positivity, but honest feedback. Don’t shy away from sharing the less nice stuff!

Audience research x product case study: Bringing more value to readers and subscribers through the mobile app

Mariah shared their product development lifecycle, with its 4 primary phases, and how they bring audience research into this. The goal is to not only use research at the discovery stage but throughout the building and post building steps to evaluate, test and optimize the product.

Looking at the example of optimizing their mobile app, internal data suggested that their app could play a bigger role in engaging and retaining subscribers.

• Engagement: subscribers who use the app have a more engaged “reader state” than those who don’t, meaning they were coming back and using the product more frequently than others
• Loyalty: they are also more likely to renew than subscribers who do not use the app
• Adoption: app adoption was lower than other products

However:

• Increasingly saturated: mobile apps struggle with discoverability and differentiation challenges
• Declining engagement: usage is down for the majority of newspaper and magazine apps in the past two years

So, they had a few key research questions to consider:

• Who is our mobile app is for? Thinking beyond demographics, such as what relationship app users might have with The Atlantic
• What are usage habits for magazine and newspaper apps in general and The Atlantic specifically? 
• How might we evolve our app to better serve readers and subscribers?

Step 1: listen

Firstly, surfacing knowledge from existing resources and sources…

Annual reader survey: 60K+ respondents findings, including open ended questions and working with the data science team to do some Natural Language Processing

Customer care team: 25K+ inquiries per month and a monthly report for the audience research team

App comments: 2K+ ratings and slack channel

Step 2: connect

Second, speaking directly with news/magazine app users…

Diary study: 12 participants are asked to track usage for 2 days, sharing why and when they used the app. This was executed via the tool dscout, useful to connect you to people who might not necessarily already be in your own email list

Survey existing app users: 500+ respondents, invited via app

Interviews: 6 subscribers, recruited via surveys

Step 3: educate

Shared our findings, firstly with product teams but also with teams across the company.

Step 4: advocate with balance

Recommendations that serve both the audience and business:

• There’s an opportunity for a broader Atlantic app audience
• Convenience and curation are the app’s most attractive attributes
• Some respondents wish The Atlantic app had more synergy with other platforms
• The Atlantic app can help make their journalism more manageable

How we used audience research to guide mobile app feature development

Strategic positioning: bolstered confidence in positioning the app as an engagement-driving tool in the wider portfolio

Identifying requirements: helped the team identify table stakes needs, what opportunities they’d missed, and what users already loved

Audience definition: clarified who the target audience should be to guide feature ideation

Packaging this up into something to use

• Distilled findings into a strategy brief recommendation focused on 3 primary opportunities in the app:
  • Helping users manage how and when they can read
  • Providing the ability to set and manage in-app preferences
  • Improving navigation and in-app feature discoverability

• Shared this brief cross-functionally and with leadership to get alignment
• Enabled us to move forward with a clear rubric and guide for what types of features to prioritize

TL;DR report highlights:

> Mobile is the dominant platform for audiences, and its use is stable or growing across major markets around the world

> News and magazines has been a fast-growing segment amongst non-gaming apps, in terms of both downloads and revenue

> There has been an explosion in demand for AI chat and image generation apps, and the technology has a halo effect, as apps with AI features benefit from the surge in interest in artificial intelligence

> First-party data is a priority for publishers, and many use their apps to collect their own data

> Publishers see an opportunity to take advantage of regulators pushing Google and Apple to open their app stores, allowing them to keep more revenue and capture more data about their subscribers

> Push notifications are a killer feature for apps, offering a unique path to direct engagement

> Audio, puzzles and digital editions deliver high levels of engagement, and publishers should lean into these formats to build loyalty and habit with audiences

> Publishers plan to develop apps with richer, more personalized content and deeper community and interactive features. Publishers are already launching apps with high-touch membership features to increase revenue

Optimistic, despite challenges

One publisher we surveyed succinctly summarized their challenges, which mirror those of the wider industry: “Rapid declines in audience and revenue, challenges through the changing digital ecosystem thanks to the rise of AI and decline of social traffic.” Publishers told us that the lingering effects of inflation have made subscribers more price-sensitive, which makes it difficult for them to raise prices for those on discounted offers. Ad demand and falling digital ad yields were also eating into their top line. 

Despite it all, publishers remained optimistic that they would weather this storm, although less so than in our previous report, and they are pessimistic about the publishing industry overall.

AI has added to this period of disruption, but the perception of its impact is mixed. Publishers are concerned that AI-powered search will erode what is currently a reliable traffic source. 

However, publishers are also optimistic that AI can give as much as it takes from them. AI dominates their innovation agenda, as they look to a suite of AI technologies to drive efficiencies and deliver new value for audiences through personalization and AI-generated summaries, which have shown promise in engaging young, mobile audiences. 

A focus on retention, experimentation with acquisition

Apps have traditionally been seen as part of publishers’ retention strategies, and retention replaced acquisition as the top priority in our latest survey of publishing professionals.

However, the well-known challenges in audience development driven by changes in search and social are driving publishers to experiment with apps as audience acquisition tools.

Publishers are using advanced data tools to monitor how their apps are being used and what drives subscriber conversion. The Baltimore Banner in the US uses BlueConic to track what content users engage with, which app features they engage with and which newsletters they are subscribed to, Eric Ulken, VP of Product at The Baltimore Banner said it allows them to correlate activity that leads to conversion or retention, and that data is changing how they view the app in the context of their subscription strategy. “We tend to see the app as a retention play, largely. I think increasingly we’re starting to understand the value that it has further up the funnel,” he added. 

The Baltimore Banner is gathering and leveraging first-party data in the app through their use of external link entitlement (ELE), which allows them to direct iOS users to their own subscription journey. ELE allows them to avoid paying Apple 15-30% of their subscription revenues and gather first-party data from their users. 

While publishers have to apply to Apple to implement ELE, most of the publishers in our survey said they were interested in exploring the option. 

> To read next: how to maximize reader engagement on mobile apps

Push Notifications: The killer feature of apps

Using their data, The Baltimore Banner found “a strong correlation between regular use of the app and retention”, Eric said. 

For the report, we analyzed the product features responsible for users’ high engagement with apps. We found:

• A minority of app users are puzzle fanatics, but these users are extremely regular.
• Audio again plays a minority role in terms of the users of most apps, but audio users spend a lot of time in an app. Looking at one high-performing app, we found that audio users spent 2.5x more time in the app than non-audio users. 

Encouraging more people to use these features will help support subscriber retention. 

Publishers also find that push notifications offer a unique opportunity to engage audiences. 

“It is the only platform that we are able to push, bring people in, without having to voluntarily follow a link. Newsletters to an extent yes, but push notifications are more effective in bringing people back,” Eric Ulken, VP of product at The Baltimore Banner said. 

In analyzing data for the report and working with our customers, we have seen one publisher increase engagement with their app by 60% simply by starting to use push notifications. According to data from the apps we build, publishers with high-performing push notification strategies, which had average open rates of 2.55%, had more than twice as much engagement when measured by sessions per user per month than publishers with low-performing strategies. 

The future of apps

With mobile being the primary platform for most countries, publishers see apps becoming more central to their strategies. They also saw apps allowing them to reach audiences they currently don’t, including younger audiences. Pugpig data shows the opportunity apps present to reach younger audiences. For one century-old publisher, 53% of their app users are under 35 compared to just 38% of their web users.

They also plan to develop their apps further to increase engagement. B2B publishers want to leverage valuable industry data with real-time dashboards and other interactive data features. Consumer publishers plan to increase the range and variety of content they publish in apps and use personalization so that audiences can quickly find relevant content in their apps. 

Several publishers have already added commenting functionality to their apps and are considering adding richer community features to support higher-revenue membership offerings. 

Hearst UK has launched new apps as a key element in its premium membership strategy. Women’s Health Collective and Men’s Health Squad members have access to members-only content including training plans they can use at the gym on their smartphones. 

“The new apps and enhanced membership offerings will allow us to create even stronger and deeper relationships with existing and new members, whilst building more opportunities for the future with premium content that people want to pay for,” David Robinson, Chief Customer Officer at Hearst UK, said. 

The report also covers how publishers can take advantage of changes in the regulatory landscape that are opening up Apple and Google’s app stores, and we look at the impact of AI on mobile apps. It is available for download now.

According to the latest Reuters Digital News Report, 36% of people worldwide choose to avoid news. In France, the Jean Jaurès Foundation found that in 2023, 53% of people suffer from information fatigue. From a business perspective, this represents a significant number of readers who may never subscribe to any news title or are at risk of unsubscribing soon. For the French newspaper Le Monde, this matter is taken seriously. This is why their team launched "Découvrir" ("Discover" in English), a new tab in their mobile app that showcases mainly positive and feel-good stories. We met Quentin Leredde, Product & Audience Director, who led this project.

Each feature team gathers a Product Manager, a Product Owner, a Developer, and a Product Designer. The role of “Product Manager” is new to us, we created it in 2022. Their mission is to lead product strategies that will bring value to users.

“Découvrir” is a mobile app feature that was developed by our mobile app team, but in fact, it was an idea born during a hackathon we organized last year…

Tell us more about this hackathon!

So in October 2022, our CTO/CIO, Sacha Morard, and Lou Grasser, Chief Marketing & Product Officer, brought 60 members of our digital teams together into one room for two intensive days. They were tasked with brainstorming new and innovative project ideas for Le Monde. We had just established this new product organization and wanted to get everyone working together. This was obviously a team-building event, but we organized it as a competition, with cash rewards for the winners!

Twelve groups, each with five members, were formed. We had PM, POs, product designers, marketers, data analysts, and developers on board – but no journalists. Each of them had to create a prototype of their idea, which had to be functional by the end of the hackathon.

To rank the projects, we used four criteria:
• Reach and impact: how many users will benefit from this project?
• Quality of execution
• ROI: business value for Le Monde
• Speed of implementation

The jury was made up of Le Monde management, including Jérôme Fénoglio, Le Monde’s Director, and Louis Dreyfus, Le Monde Group’s CEO.

Out of the 12 projects presented, two made it to our 2023 roadmap, and both have since been released, with “Découvrir” claiming the first prize.

Ah great ! Do tell us more…

The team who came up with this idea had the latest Reuters Digital News Report in mind. It reveals that 36% of people worldwide now chose to avoid the news, a significant increase from the 29% recorded in 2017! They also gathered insights from many of our unsubscribed readers, who emphasized the negative impact of news – how it was often depressing and anxiety-inducing. These readers expressed a strong desire for more positive stories. In France, the Jean Jaurès Foundation reported that, in 2023, 53% of people suffer from information fatigue…

From a business standpoint, this represents a substantial number of readers who might never subscribe to Le Monde or may churn soon. That is a serious business challenge for us, and all news media outlets worldwide.

So, Florence Pouvatchy, Nicolas Viry, Jérémie Chambrion, Agnès Bregeon and Georgia Gaye had this brilliant idea. They wanted to give our readers some ‘breathing space’ within the mobile app, quite the opposite of the busy, fast-moving home page. The plan was to curate uplifting content to provide readers with some relief from anxiety-inducing news. At the same time, they wanted to shine a light on those hidden gems of content, the kind that often gets buried in the constant news flow.

The project, which code name was “Escape with Le Monde”, had three dimensions:

• an immersive experience to reinforce the escapist effect,
• introducing a mood selector with reader purposes (get inspired, enjoy, understand, act…),
• and integrating personalization based on the reader’s interests.

But the last two items are not included in the current version yet.

What business goals are you pursuing with this project?

With “Découvrir”, we have two primary objectives:

• Combat the disengagement of our products
• Improve subscriber retention

Why did this project win the first prize in the hackathon?

This project stood out because it aligns perfectly with Le Monde’s mission. Fighting news avoidance and information fatigue is a priority for Le Monde. Of course, this has an impact on our bottom line, but it also leads readers to seek alternative, sometimes less reliable sources of information. So it’s becoming a democratic problem, and for Le Monde, it’s a major source of concern.

Another advantage of the project was that it didn’t require additional editorial production. All the articles featured in the “Découvrir” tab already existed; they were just not very visible.

A couple of years ago, we launched the “Fil Good” newsletter (play of words with “Feel good”), which sends our subscribers a selection of feel-good stories. This weekly newsletter has been a huge success. We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to showcase the positive content we produce, which often gets overshadowed by negative news as I explained earlier.

Did you take inspiration from other media for this new section?

When working on new projects, we always like to benchmark against what other media outlets are doing, especially overseas.

We’ve been looking at The Guardian’s mobile app feature, “Discover”, which presents long-format stories in a dedicated tab for subscribers.

We also explored the Washington Post’s “Well Being” vertical.

Technically speaking, how does “Découvrir” work? How are articles selected to appear in this section?

First, in terms of themes, it’s important to note that “Discover” not only features “feel good” articles, but also content that accompanies readers in their daily lives, with topics on culture, love, health, cooking, lifestyle, and more. We keep the news content to a minimum, or break down news to help readers better understand current events. We take great care in ensuring that “Découvrir” is not just a repetition of the home page…

Functionally, we’ve selected about forty eligible tags for “Découvrir”, and it’s a fully automated feed. There is no human editor involved. In total, we present between 10 and 15 articles a day.

How did this project go internally? When did you start working on it and which teams were involved?

We kicked things off last spring. As I mentioned earlier, the idea came up during a digital product hackathon, but it was a highly editorial project, so we had to include the newsroom from the very beginning. Francoise Tovo, Le Monde’s deputy editor-in-chief, worked closely with us, and her expert eye has been incredibly valuable. The journalists were immediately seduced by the idea, but we wanted to validate our intuitions with User Research.

We learnt a lot from our focus groups :

• Readers easily grasped the section’s philosophy, which was good news!
• They liked the diverse content mix, so we held off on developing content filters.
• The storie’s intro paragraph that appeared to be useless, so we hid it

As of now, “Découvrir” only exists on your mobile app. Do you plan on launching it on your website Lemonde.fr as well?

For now, it’s only on our mobile app, where we have our most engaged users. We may consider launching it on our website in the future, but our tech roadmap is currently full of projects!

What has been the most challenging aspect of this project?

Finding the right name! We wanted something that sounded like “evasion” or “escape”, but neither of these options worked… so we settled for the simple “Découvrir” (“Discover” in English).

It’s been a week since you launched “Découvrir”, what’s the initial feedback?

Initially, we had planned to launch on October 11th, but due to the Israël-Hamas conflict, we decided to postpone it for a week. We realized that this horrific event wasn’t going to subside anytime soon, and we couldn’t delay the launch indefinitely. However, the initial reception we got from our readers emphasized the need for this kind of editorial content, particularly during such difficult times.

We launched a quick survey among our readers: 82% told us they were satisfied or very satisfied with “Découvrir”. What pleased us the most was that people clearly understood our objectives: less news, more information, nice visuals, and no anxiety.

Which Key Performance Indicators will you be monitoring in the coming months?

Engagement is our core focus. We’ll be looking at:

• Frequency of visits over a week and a month among both our subscribers and free readers.
• Retention of subscribers during the critical first few weeks. We’ll track subscriber retention after 3 months, 6 months, and a year.

We’ll also look at our qualitative surveys, where news fatigue is often mentioned – do those signals calm down over time?

What are the next phases of development you have planned on this project?

There are no further developments planned for the remainder of this year. In 2024, we’ll be introducing personalization to align with reader’s interests, and deploying news filters.

We’re really happy with the product as it stands right now. The digital team has perfectly grasped the challenges faced by major general-interest daily newspapers, like Le Monde, particularly in terms of information avoidance and subscriber retention. This editorial project has the full support of our editorial team and, in its early stages, has been met with satisfaction from our readers.

FT Edit and the Financial Times

FT Edit is a new app by the Financial Times that offers 8 in-depth articles a day. The app aims to replace the endless scrolling on social media and news sites with more thought-provoking reading time. It’s the first new app the company has launched in a decade.

Contrary to popular belief, I think there’s virtue in launching something new on a decades-old foundation. The team felt like a startup, while our 135-year-old organisation is far more comfortable launching new products now than a year ago. Here is what I’ve learnt:

1. Identify your baseline

We had a good starting point – the FT already had a strong internal belief that:

1. FT content has much larger audience appeal than our subscriber base (look at our 7m LinkedIn followers), and
2. It’s hard to attract new customers at scale with our price of +£35 a month.

But launching new products requires a new mindset. Drawing on my previous experience launching new features at Google Arts & Culture and running my own startup, I knew a lot needed to change.

Being an intrapreneur always requires cautious patience which can, at times, clash with an entrepreneurial spirit. I mapped in my head the areas that were critical to change immediately; areas I could change later; and things I needed to accept and appreciate.

2. Pick your battles

When launching a new venture, you need to be ready to make decisions every minute. Inevitably, there will be arguments — a positive sign you have surrounded yourself with thoughtful, critically-thinking individuals. However, as you have limited time and energy, being wise on which battles to pick is essential for success (and your sanity).

My rule was that I aimed to influence situations that were vital for validating product-market fit.

For example, the FT’s initial understanding of a low-cost product was £19 a month. While it’s nearly half the price of the current subscription, it’s still more expensive than any other news subscription on the market. Our main job with the FT Edit was to understand if users would engage with the product and be willing to pay for it, at scale. If we set a price that was too high, we wouldn’t know if it was the proposition that didn’t resonate with readers, or the price was too high for that proposition. It was a “make or break” decision and we decided to push the organisation to agree on a cheaper price (currently £0.99 for the 6-month trial).

As you have limited remit (and energy) as a Product Manager, there were areas that I challenged but decided to park for later. These were mainly areas which, prior to launch, we had no data on, therefore it was pointless to engage in long discussions. For instance, we took the decision not to include new articles on the app during the weekend; instead we would feature “best articles of the week”. One year after launch, we are seeing weekend engagement rapidly decreasing for new users and the team is now revising this approach.

Finally, there were the situations I had to work with. In our case, it was whether we could launch a fake-door paywall instead of spending time developing a working paying solution. One of the worries was it would impact our brand. I sensed that the organisation was not ready for this type of crude experimentation. A year later, this is no longer the case!

3. Get your team comfortable with ambiguity

There will be many moments in the new product development journey where you need a team that is comfortable saying, “I don’t know, let’s try and see” or “Yes, why not”. It’s an attitude that is significantly different from the requirements of a regular job, no matter the department. In a normal setting, you are praised in your job if you know all the answers and you are detail-oriented.

Doing new product development requires the opposite virtues: distilling signals from noise, and knowing what’s important to focus on right now, and what you should worry about later.

For example, the FT Edit experience is no different for users who have been paying for 2 months or for 8 months. We decided that life-time value is something we will optimise for only if we validate there are enough users ready to pay for the product after using it for a month. This is not to say that long-term retention is not important, but we made the conscious decision that our resources were limited, and there were more important things to solve right now.

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who, although they had no experience in launching new products, were curious and excited and wanted to challenge the status quo. This mentality made our team move much faster.

4. Take the team on a journey with you

If you are someone who has launched multiple new products, you probably have the whole playbook in your head, but don’t assume people from your team will know what’s coming next. It’s the job of the Product Manager to ensure everyone in the team understands the decisions you take and feels confident that we are building the right thing. I aimed to be systematic and transparent on the product decisions I’m making and what would follow based on different results and scenarios. I aimed always to articulate to the team what our product strategy was and why we had prioritised one feature over others.

We did a few things that helped tactically: we have a weekly team meeting with everyone working on the project. All qualitative or quantitative research is shared in that meeting, we discuss the results and we make decisions together.

5. Everything revolves around the value proposition

Our team spent months surveying users, doing diary studies and user interviews, before we designed even one screen. Articulating clearly what problems your product solves and where it adds value into people’s lives is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Still, if this information is mentioned once in a meeting and then collects digital dust in a shared folder, it all goes to waste. I quickly understood that this was not a one-off activity. Particularly in the early days, we mentioned the value proposition at every single discussion we had around the product.

One way we ensured alignment was involving all departments from inception — marketing, brand, PR, editorial, product, technology. They were surely annoyed with me and Maia Bridi (our stellar researcher at the time) asking the whole team to attend user interviews or sit through key insight sessions. We filtered any decision through the lens of our value proposition. This resulted in marketing coining the slogan “Time well read” for our launch in March 2022, as well as editor-in-chief Roula Khalaf describing the app as a way to “Read less, understand more”. It’s exciting to see how little by little everyone is playing to the same tone for a new product you have created together.

> Discover value proposition benchmarks from successful publishers

6. Are we there yet?! Defining success before launch

Another thing that empowered the team to stay focused and move quickly was having a clear definition of success from the very beginning of the product development journey. Reaching product market fit is an elusive term if you don’t know what you want to achieve. In our case, we know we would be successful if FT Edit reached the industry benchmark for Download-to-Paid rate on mobile news apps, and if we did this at scale.

Having a high Download-to-Paid rate with few users would mean we were a niche product; having a lot of users with low willingness to pay would mean we were not offering anything new or valuable.

On the latter, consider how you will reach product channel fit: how to optimise your product to work with the top communication channels your audience is using. It would be a mistake to focus exclusively on growth before you have validated your product is valuable to users, but it’s important to consider embedding one or two growth loops into your product early on. In our case, we over-relied on paid marketing activities at launch which should not be the only growth driver to any new product as marketing budgets are never endless.

7. The perfect MVP doesn’t exist

It’s a paradox: you cannot create a perfect product, if you haven’t launched a scrappy minimum viable product (MVP) first. The process of new product development is a iterative, sometimes chaotic journey that requires you to launch unfinished products to learn how to make them better. By contrast, the FT has a reputation as one of the most trustworthy organisations in the world for the opposite reason: perfection is the aim with everything we publish. This could easily have created tension between the product and editorial teams.

Luckily, the editors on the app, Malcolm Moore and Hannah Rock, were open-minded, and they trusted me with adopting a new approach to work.

While we kept our perfectionism in the editorial realm, we learnt how to be more experimental with testing our assumptions and launching experiments, from new push notifications to product improvements.

8. Validate your biggest assumptions as early as possible

Before the minimum viable products, there were the minimum viable tests. I often share this article by Gagan Biyani, which discusses a leaner approach to testing new product concepts.

It asks you to list all the things that need to be true for your product to succeed.

FT Edit is an app offering long-reads, we therefore needed to validate if people would be willing to do that long reading on their phones. We did this in a diary study before we had a working product and no user has brought it up as a problem.

You don’t need a team of engineers and extensive A/B testing to validate whether your product has a chance of success.

Once you have that initial validation and knowledge, it becomes much easier to pitch internally for more resources.

Hope this was useful!

Choose your edition

Do you have readers in different continents? Or maybe articles in other languages? Let your readers choose which edition they’d like on their app.

Le Monde, the French newspaper, has an English edition. Upon arriving on the app, we’re asked to choose between the two versions.

Whilst on CNN, in the U.S., we’re offered the option of a newsfeed focused on the U.S. or international stories.

Customized alerts

Push notifications and alerts are one of the best ways to keep readers coming back for more. Thanks to the app, your content is always available in their pocket, you just have to give them a reason to open the app.

However, you can frustrate readers if you notify them too much, and with alerts that don’t interest them.

The solution? Ensure alerts are personalized to the reader’s interests.

The New York Times integrates small modules into articles, offering readers the chance to activate alerts related to that specific topic. Here, “World” alerts. Activating these only requires a single click.

Welt displays a pop-up upon arriving on the app, asking us to activate alerts or pass, with a supporting image showing what “activating alerts” will look like.

CNN goes a step further with a pop-up that lists the various topic alerts that a reader could activate. “Breaking news” and “Top news and analysis” are automatically activated, but this can be undone in 2 clicks.

On the Financial Times app, they’ve integrated a module into the home page, allowing readers to activate notifications. This module is in a different color, dark grey with white text, to stand out from story blocks, with a value proposition that tells us why we should complete this action – to be the first to hear about the stories that matter – and bell icons to reflect the action of receiving notifications.

On-app onboarding

Just like SaaS product tours, you should introduce your reader to the app, it’s features and encourage them to activate anything that’s valuable for increasing engagement.

However, we’d recommend keeping the onboarding process short, interactive, and visually appealing, perhaps saving some personalization or onboarding steps for later in the user’s journey, such as when they try to access pages or activate features.

On The Washington Post app, we’re first offered the option to pass through the onboarding steps or not.

Step one allows us to choose our alerts, each with its own emoji, the perfect way to illustrate the different sections for mobile-readers who are used to these visuals. Alerts can be activated in a click and there are plenty of options to appeal to each reader’s interests.

Step two is a unique one, introducing us to their “audio article” feature and allowing us to adjust the speed and voice to our liking. Audio articles, often generated by AI, are a valuable way to increase engagement for a variety of reasons according to this article on FT’s Medium page:

• Embracing and building habits – “We found that the most popular reason why subscribers listen to audio articles is the ability to multitask. By enabling hands free content consumption and multi-tasking, audio articles allow users to consume content in situations where they don’t usually have the option to read”
• Responding to users’ time pressure – “The great thing about audio articles is that they don’t necessarily compete with other activities. By removing the need to look at a screen, users can listen to stories while they go on about their days. So without spending more time or compromising on existing routines, audio articles allow users to get more value from their subscriptions.” – this is perhaps even more prominent when it comes to consuming content on mobile
• Driving incremental content consumption – “Our data shows that allowing users to listen to articles does not cannibalise on reading. On the contrary, we found that it adds to their content consumption overall”
• Attracting young audiences – “Research findings suggest that audio (articles) can be a useful tool in building relationships and attracting young readers in particular.”
• Improving accessibility – “In the UK, there are over 2 million people who are living with sight loss, 340,000 of these are registered blind or partially sighted. Providing the ability to listen to articles will help visually impaired subscribers and allows us to reach and engage a larger audience overall.”

Some best practices for these onboarding steps:

• Reassure: “Update them anytime”
• Offer options: “choose later” link at the bottom of the page
• Communicate the onboarding journey: “Step 1 of 2”
• Consider which engagement actions are the most valuable to your business by analyzing existing, loyal app users with high frequency and volume of visits. Do they have push notifications turned on? Do they listen to their content rather then read? This will help you define the most valuable onboarding steps to prioritize
• On each page: a short, succinct title with a form of explanation or value proposition, explaining exactly what this step involves and why a reader should complete the action
• Minimal actions (clicks, scrolls, form fields) needed to complete this step

Download or queue content

One of the 4 main reasons why people don’t pay for news (according to a study) is time. However, as readers pretty much always have their phone in their pocket, there’s a few ways in which you can ensure your content still gets consumed:

• Save content for later, building a queue or a reading list
• As mentioned above, audio content is a great way to allow readers to listen to your articles whilst completing another task
• Download content, whether that be audio or text. I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world, but this is vital for the UK where you can’t get signal whilst on the tube in London. By allowing app users to download your content, you’re filling time in their morning commute that they can’t fill with social media or messaging

Customizable homescreen and topics

We all know that personalization is essential for high engagement. But it doesn’t have to involve a machine-learnt technology. Instead, let your readers customize their feed, selecting the topics that interest them.

To ensure readers know that this option is available, The Washington Post has a pop-up that displays on our first visit to the home page, letting us know we can customize this page.

I would add here that maybe an entirely customized feed has its limitations and could confine readers in a box of similar content, preventing them from seeing all the value that you can provide.

Perhaps a middle ground would be a customizable feed with “Recommendation” modules suggesting similar content to help expand their reading.

Live feed

Readers today have been conditioned by the mobile and social revolutions to spend a significant amount of time scrolling on their phones. The structure of live feeds mimic this same concept, keeping readers on your app for longer by constantly providing them with new content.

What’s more, these formats allow publishers to share not only text and images but also social media posts, graphics, videos… anything that can be embedded as an iFrame. Why does this matter? By seamlessly integrating a variety of mediums into one format, you can take digital storytelling to new heights by providing readers with a variety of captivating text and visual content.

All in all, these formats have proven to bring readers back and keep them on-app for longer, two metrics that directly contribute to higher subscription and retention rates.

Welt makes the most of this engagement feature with a dedicated live feed tab.