James Webb is a product leader with 15 years of experience helping news subscription businesses boost subscriber retention. Most recently, he served as Apps Group Product Manager at The Economist, and previously as Product Director at the FT. In this article, James looks at the 2026 Pugpig Media App Report and argues that the value is hiding where standard metrics don’t look.

> Nearly half of app users are anonymous, and most publishers barely optimise to convert them. James Webb, formerly Apps Group Product Manager at The Economist and Product Director at the FT, reads Pugpig's 2026 Media App Report and argues the value is hiding where standard metrics don't look

> Offline is not an edge case. At both The Economist and the FT, offline was around 10% of screenviews and cellular around 30%. If half those cellular sessions hit patchy signal, roughly one in four opens happens with the app on the back foot, and session analytics are flaky in exactly those conditions, so it is undercounted

> Digital still prices like it is scarce: one person, one paywall, one login, so a household either buys four subscriptions nobody can justify or three people free-load invisibly. The Times gives subscribers free bonus accounts and found those users 76% more likely to say they would stay, with churn under 0.01%. The New York Times charges for the same idea, three extra logins at $30 a month against four separate $25 subscriptions

> Only 26% of publishers say their app's main job is acquisition, yet apps are full of non-subscribers who hit a paywall after a single article. Habits take months, not one read. The Times' £1 for three months gives someone a chance to form one; a seven-day trial does not

Pugpig’s 2026 Media App Report is, on the surface, a story about apps being taken seriously again. Engagement is up, A/V, games, push and personalisation are the priorities of the year. 

However, a few aspects caught my attention: first, how the report handles offline usage; second, what publishers (and this report) seem to be missing regarding household engagement opportunities; and third, how restrictive most publishers are when it comes to sampling.

Take the standard funnel, or rather, loop ;). We’re all familiar with the sequence: acquire, activate, engage, retain etc. It’s surprising that nearly half of app users are anonymous, but that most publishers barely optimise anything to convert them. The habit-forming features sit at the bottom of the adoption table, with games at 16% and video at 22%. Subscriber retention, the KPI that tends to be most important, is one of the least well measured, with only a small fraction reporting advanced capability. I have some thoughts on where publishers could do much better for themselves.

> Audiencers’ summary of the Pugpig Media App Report 2026 is here

1. Offline is not an edge case

The Pugpig report treats cellular and offline usage as a small, almost incidental slice of total screenviews. I find this hard to believe.

For readers who commute, fly and move through cellular blackspots constantly (at least in the UK), that slice is nowhere near as small as the report suggests. At the Economist offline and cellular usage represented around 10% and 30% respectively, and at the FT it was broadly the same. If half of those cellular sessions hit a patchy signal, then roughly one in four opens happens with the app on the back foot. Before we rebuilt The Economist app natively, that experience was painfully brittle. And our best subscribers were paying the price (and letting us know about it in volumes).

Think about who reads on a tube platform, in a station concourse or at thirty thousand feet. They are people who deliberately brought your content with them, likely your most loyal base, and it is exactly where too many apps still don’t handle things gracefully: articles that half-load, images that spin, editions that won’t sync, glitchy ad reloads, saves that fail without telling anyone. 

There is a measurement problem too. Session analytics under these conditions are notoriously flakey, so are probably undercounted. The report’s engagement numbers are likely a floor, not a ceiling, for audiences who read on the move. Treat offline and low connectivity as a retention issue, and test your edition, save and caching with the network switched off, as well as just slow.

Of course, Product Designers always design for state (eg connectivity), but in these constrained times, this is often the polish that gets deprioritised, and then forgotten about, by teams under pressure to deliver to tight deadlines. Publishers who’ve raised the bar won’t necessarily be the ones with the flashiest new formats – though they’ll likely have deeper pockets. Pugpig’s own data half-confirms this: mobile-plus-editions apps, the least fashionable format in the report, still outperform mobile-only apps on almost every engagement measure. My hunch is the same pattern holds for reliability under poor connectivity. It’s unglamorous, it won’t make your slideware pop when selling it to stakeholders, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that decides whether a reader who trusted you on a delayed train chooses to open your app tomorrow, and the next day. 

2. Digital still prices like it’s scarce

Pre-internet, it was fair game for anyone else in the house to read the primary reader’s copy of the newspaper. In the subscriptions era, digital has done the opposite from day one: one person, one paywall, one login, and a family of four either buys four subscriptions nobody can justify, or one person subscribes and everyone else free-loads, unconverted and invisible.

Very few publishers seem to have figured out that this is simply a design choice, and a poor one for tracking true engagement behaviours.

There are only three that spring to mind. The Times led with “bonus accounts” some time last year, letting subscribers share access with family or friends at no extra cost, essentially recreating the breakfast-table version of the newspaper digitally. This was inspired by Le Figaro’s play to reduce password sharing. The New York Times has introduced a paid family tier, up to three extra logins for $30 a month total rather than four separate $25 subscriptions, each with its own personalised account and its own Wordle streak. 

The Times treats sharing as a retention feature you don’t charge extra for. Everyone in a shared account has their own login. A family plan with individual, personalised accounts isn’t just cheaper access, it’s four separate chances to turn an anonymous user into a known user, to learn what they read, deepen the relationship with features suited to them, rather than one subscriber and one or two freeloaders who never show up in a single engagement analysis. 

From there a loop forms. An invited member gets their own login, activates on their own terms, and their usage compounds. Household engagement makes cancelling harder, and a member with a year of habits behind them is a far better candidate to subscribe in their own right than a cold prospect.

It may take time, but it works. The Times found people using shared bonus accounts were 76% more likely to say they’d stay subscribed, and churn on those accounts ran under 0.01%. Shared use turns a single subscription into a sticky household relationship.

NYT’s reasoning for the family tier was explicit: people with a lighter relationship to the paper become far more likely to convert once a friend or family member brings them in. When they convert or renew the household plan, they can invite someone else, expanding reach household by household.

Put this next to the anonymous-user problem from earlier and the opportunity becomes obvious. Nearly half of app users are anonymous, and most publishers barely optimise to convert them. A family member added to a household plan is the friendliest version of that anonymous user: someone already inside the tent, already reading, and one step away from being known.

The ones building this loop have figured it out. They’re turning the thing publishers tend to treat as leakage into the fastest lever they have for both retention and growth.

3. Be more generous with sampling/trials

According to the Pugpig report, only 26% of publishers say the main role of their app is subscriber acquisition, yet many apps attract plenty of non-subscribers who are far less engaged than payers. I’ve read countless angry reviews from people who followed a prompt to download the app and hit a paywall after a single article. Habits take weeks or more likely months to bed-in, not one read. The Times’ £1 for three months is a far better way to let new entrants get a feel for the product than a seven day trial ever will.

Apps are getting better at keeping the people they already have. Meaningful opportunities are hiding where standard metrics don’t bother to look: the reader with no signal, the family member re-using a login, and the anonymous user we ask to pay before they’ve had a chance to connect with your journalism. How can we expect younger people to adopt news apps that weren’t even designed for how they want to consume media, if we don’t even give them a decent chance to try it out?

James Webb has led mobile and web product groups at The Economist and the Financial Times. For a deeper look at why 82% of publishers misdiagnose their delivery bottlenecks, read The capacity myth: why your product bottleneck is actually a focus problem, on Substack.

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As search, social and AI continue to reshape discovery, publishers are looking for more reliable ways to connect with readers directly. Apps are playing an increasingly important role in strengthening owned channels and supporting subscriber relationships.

The Pugpig 2026 Media App Report offers a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t and what the top-performing apps have in common. Combining analytics from more than 440 apps with survey responses from 140 publishers, it’s our most data-rich edition yet. 

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SFGATE has been a free site for its entire existence. Rather than bolt a paywall onto that, the team built something separate: a paid app called Friends of SFGATE, designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. We spoke with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, about the thinking behind it, four weeks after launch.

> SFGATE didn't add a paywall to its free site. It built a separate paid app instead, so the free web experience that built its audience stays untouched

> The name "Friends of SFGATE" beat "subscription" and "membership" in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> Nearly 90% of readers who took the 7-day free trial converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it's still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time, not just once by anyone

> The launch required real org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.

Why not just add a paywall

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Stefan Schneiderbauer is Senior Product Manager at Funke Mediengruppe, where he is responsible for product and development across 13 regional news app brands. Speaking at Audiencers’ Festival London in June 2026, Stefan shared a new framework that he developed to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgement, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

> Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever's loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. To overcome this, Germany's FUNKE Mediengruppe built a framework to replace that with something structured and evidence-led instead: a KPI tree

> Start with one metric at the top, not a dashboard. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit something Stefan calls a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift

> Once you have even a partial tree, run a basic sensitivity check. Move two input variables by 5% each and see which one moves the KPI above it more. That tells you where to run your next sprint, not guesswork

> Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke's four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree's branches

> Don't start with the whole tree. Stefan's advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand

Paradigms are shifting in real-time: News brands used to compete on access to information. That advantage is largely gone, due to the abundance of daily generated content from all different kinds of sources, AI generated content included. What remains is trust, and trust is earned through the quality of journalism, not the sophistication of the product. How the journalistic core gets expressed and amplified in a digital environment is the job of the product organisation. When the two work in isolation, even the best journalism struggles to build the sustained reader relationships that trust requires. To gain and earn the trust of readers, product and journalism need to work more closely together than ever.

This article is focused on the product side of that equation. Specifically, on how we built a framework at Funke News Apps to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgment, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

I am responsible for app development across 13 news brands at Funke Mediengruppe. Over the past 12 months we repositioned our apps as a strategic growth pillar, which involved a redesign at scale, bringing development in-house, introducing user-segmented advertising, among many other great developments. I want to share the framework that sits beneath all of it.

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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 puts around 90% of its product resources into the mobile app, with teams built around it. App usage is now the single most predictive indicator of subscriber retention

> That displaced what they used to prioritise. Multi-channel engagement and newsletter signups were the signals they watched before, and app usage beats both

> The numbers behind it: app users have eight more sessions a week than web users, and 30-day retention is six percentage points higher. App usage grew 15% in a year

> Access is light freemium: the home screen and a few articles open, the rest for subscribers, with a 14-day trial for new app users in exchange for an email. It converts better than a standard paywall

> The catch they are open about is that people drop off when the trial ends unless the follow-up is well orchestrated, so activation after day 14 is the live problem

Founded in 1855, The Telegraph is one of the UK’s leading news outlets, with 30 million monthly readers across its website, app and print editions, and over a million subscribers.

The product culture is long-standing and well-established, with the ability to make clear and decisive decisions about subscriptions and the reader experience.

The mobile app: a flagship product

In 2022, The Telegraph merged its two apps: the first was a digital version of the newspaper – highly regarded but little used; the second was a live feed version – more widely distributed but not very popular.

The current app is the result of 3-4 years of work, with engaging additional features such as games, news feeds, discoveries and newsletters.

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

Of all the projects tested in recent years, not everything has worked, and that’s key to the approach: test quickly, keep what works, and discard the rest.

The access model is simple: light freemium. The home screen and a few articles are visible to everyone, while the rest is reserved for subscribers. To compensate for the significant amount of closed content, new app users are offered a 14-day trial, available via email. This allows for data collection and has proved more valuable to conversion rates than a standard paywall. The downside however is that users may drop out after 14 days if the follow-up is not well orchestrated, hence the ongoing work on activation and retention after the trial.

The app significantly out-performs web

Mobile app users have eight more sessions per week than web users and show six more subscription retention points at 30 days.

App usage is becoming the most predictive indicator of retention, ahead of other signals that were previously considered priorities, such as multi-channel engagement and newsletter subscriptions. This justifies the strategic refocusing and budget shift.

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Craig Law is a Product Marketing Manager at The Guardian, responsible for marketing the Guardian Premium News app and the Guardian’s print subscription products. In this article he explains the context and decisions behind The Guardian’s app relaunch.

> Three quarters of the Guardian's digital readers arrive on mobile, and its premium app now has a million daily users and is the second biggest revenue driver in the business

> The finding that cuts against the industry: Guardian readers actively resist an algorithmic feed. My Guardian is built around personal curation, with readers choosing topics rather than a model choosing for them

> They also refused the obvious pitch. Research showed readers don't want echo chambers, so the marketing sold the diversity of topics you can follow rather than the ability to filter news out

> Audio came from noticing the app peaks in the morning, when hands are busy. Every article can now be listened to, and a dedicated Audio tab lifted podcast listens 34%

> The Puzzles hub gives readers a reason to open the app when they can't face the news. Page views went from thousands to millions almost overnight, and it opened a whole new marketing angle

As with other media organisations, the Guardian has been establishing ways to better understand reader behaviours and how they continue to evolve and change.  A number of factors have changed how readers now consume news today, from the rise of AI chatbots and ‘click-less’ news, to the growing dominance of video-driven content on social media platforms like TikTok, as well as increasing levels of news fatigue and avoidance.

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

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Social referrals are in free fall, and search is following close behind. Publishers are being pushed to rethink how they connect with their audiences – and apps are stepping up as one of the most important tools in the mix.

In this year’s Pugpig Media App Report, based on usage data and insights from 130 publishers and 400 apps, one message came through loud and clear: Media brands are leaning into apps because they deliver their most engaged audience. 

The report shows just how widely user behaviour can vary. It includes a highly comprehensive set of industry benchmarks drawn from hundreds of live apps across news, consumer and business media. The benchmarks break down performance by vertical, publishing frequency, content format, device type and more. 

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Developing daily habits among your audiences drives retention, and as Greg Piechota of INMA has said, retention will make publishers more money than higher ARPU. Push notifications and other app messaging can be a powerful tool for building those habits, with the most successful publishers seeing twice as much engagement as poor performers. To understand what drives success, Pugpig partnered with Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly and found: 

• The rewards outweigh the risks. – While most news publishers use push notifications, others are more reluctant, especially those with less frequent publishing schedules. The report proves the rewards from push notifications and other app messaging are much greater than any perceived risks. 
• Use app messaging to build habits immediately. – Airship found that the first 48 hours after downloads are critical to engaging new users with an app.  Multi-channel onboarding messaging, including email, in-app messaging and push notifications, builds the engagement necessary to make your app part of a new user’s daily habits. 
• Relevance drives messaging success. – The report includes three case studies, and the common thread is that successful publishers employed tactics to increase the relevance of their messages. 

The insights are included in a report on app messaging best practices, which includes clear guidance on how to use app messaging to increase engagement and retention to achieve your editorial and commercial goals. 

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“Our products are better when informed by the people who use them“

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.

What is audience research at The Atlantic?

A relatively new discipline at The Atlantic, audience research was launched in 2019 right before their digital subscription product. Audience research is part of 3 insights teams – advertising, data science and audience research. The role of the latter is to connect directly with subscribers, to bring their voice into the room when making decisions about product. For The Atlantic, it’s an incredibly important discipline as they believe products are better when informed by the people who use them.

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Media businesses are facing their most difficult moment ever, Politico and Axios co-founder Jim VanderHei recently said as he ticked off challenges in audience acquisition and monetization. To compete, publishers have focused on understanding audience needs to refine their products to drive engagement and reader revenue. 

Against this backdrop, the role of apps is shifting as publishers take advantage of their traditional retention benefits while looking to develop them further to acquire new subscribers and engage new audiences, according to Pugpig’s latest State of Mobile Publishing Report. 

The report draws on industry insights, exclusive analytics data from the hundreds of apps Pugpig builds and a survey of more than 70 publishers. It provides actionable intelligence on how publishers can grow the audience and engagement for their apps, new opportunities with apps to increase first-party data and future app features that publishers believe will deliver on their editorial and business goals.

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