Publisher finds that targeted push notifications reduced subscriber churn PLUS People increasingly turning to TikTok for news and search

July 22, 2022

The report from Piano showing how many new digital subscribers become inactive within the first 24 hours, and they often only become active again to cancel their new subscriptions, which demonstrates how conversion strategies must quickly turn to retention strategies. In 2019, I went to a Google News Initiative conference in the US, and a South American publisher had created a user conversion and retention hourglass. I think models like this help focus the business on the full spectrum of building a subscription or membership business.

Piano recommended some strategies to keep new users engaged, and German Publisher Kölner Stadt Anzeiger Medien identified a group of subscribers that were most likely to churn, to cancel their subscriptions. Once they had done this, they then sent push notifications to these subscribers. The cancellation rate was 5% lower among those who received these push notifications than the control group. That is not earth-shattering, but it does point to an interesting area for additional experimentation.

Axios does a smart, bite-size analysis of Informa's acquisition of Industry Dive. Informa gets a fleet (24) of niche industry newsletters, and Industry Dive gets access to new audiences and resources to scale. The 5x revenue deal shows how promising Informa thinks the deal will be. It also shows how digital publishing is now upending the trade publication space by rapidly building a profitable business that would once have been served by industry magazines.

On the advice of Nick Petrie, I have been using a service called Refind, which I have been tuning to provide me with an excellent feed of product strategy and management content. Today, it turned up something to mull over this weekend - The many faces of 'mobile first'. Mobile reaches 87% of the world's population. That's simply stunning. Brad Frost goes through the cultural, strategic, design and development issues related to this revolution.

There is a raft of social media news today as well.

  • Rapidly rising video social media platform TikTok is now drawing search and news users away from other players. Google and news shops should be on the lookout! - Social Media Today

  • Facebook's long, slow divorce from news. Is Zuck is abandoning the battlefield? Or is he just tired of the issues related to news? - By my friend Adam Tinwoth

  • Or is Zuck pivoting in other ways to challenge the Chinese video insurgent? Facebook launches a more TikTok-like news feed - Social Media Today

  • Snap shares plunge as ad growth slows - CNBC

"Targeted push notifications can reduce cancellations, according to one publisher’s experiment." Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 21 Jul. 2022. Web. 21 Jul. 2022.

The business media company has grown to $100 million in revenue in a decade.

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Social Media Today

Meta is putting Facebook's journalism-related features on the back burner. The social network's on and off relationship with news is finally over.

Snap missed Wall Street estimates for sales and disclosed a wider-than-expected loss in its second-quarter earnings report.

Social Media Today

We see the phrase 'mobile first' everywhere. Luke Wroblewski definitely struck a nerve when he coined the phrase a few years ago and created an important battle cry as we head into this multi-screen future. Luke's definition of mobile first consists of three core components:

The growth of mobile