In this special Conversations episode of The Publisher Podcast, sponsored by Pugpig, we hear from CEO and founder Jonny Kaldor about the data that proves apps are engagement and retention powerhouses.
Pugpig has just released its annual 2026 Media App Report, packed with benchmarks and insights from 140 media brands and 440+ live apps. Jonny looks at some of the publisher app trends from the report, why direct consumer relationships are the highest priority right now, and the deeper levels of engagement shown by app users compared to web visitors.
He also explains why apps are now surprisingly being used for subscriber acquisition, not just retention, and how publishers can identify gaps in their conversion strategies using apps.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
What’s changed with apps over the past year
I think apps serve the same purpose they have done for a long time. The difference is that, like any technology, we’ve been through the excitement and the ‘Valley of despair‘, and now I think we’re genuinely getting back to a sense of maturity…that [apps] are an absolute requirement, table-stakes now, whereas five years ago we were actually having to justify why people needed to do this.
All of this talk about Google Zero, and referrals falling off a cliff, it does feel like direct consumer relationships are the most important thing right now for publishers. There’s a general sense across our publisher portfolio… that this is the number one platform for them now in terms of engagement, with the super valuable parts of their audience.
Fliss, who is joining us next week [at The Publisher Summit in London]… they’ve actually switched from web-first to app-first. Particularly for consumer magazine brands, I think that’s really interesting. 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 is really interesting.
Apps for subscriber acquisition
It’s absolutely clear that apps are terrible at acquiring new audiences, because how on earth would you happen upon an app in that way? Almost everyone who’s downloading an app has some prior knowledge of a brand.
But, if you take a broad stroke across our portfolio, something like 92% of our publishers have a paywall. So they tend not to be free apps, and yet about 50% of the users in these apps are non-subscribers. So there is a huge audience using these things, getting some sort of value out of them, and not paying any money, not generating any reader revenue.
There’s clearly a big opportunity to take that group of people and work out how to drive them up that pyramid from anonymous to known to subscribing to advocate and member, and so on.
If you only see [apps] 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.
Now, as publishers try to eke out more and more value, the app just seems like an obvious place to go. People like The Independent for example, and Stylist do tend to think a little bit differently, and are starting to think about those user journeys. How can you surface enough content to get people hooked, but leave enough behind the paywall so that you know the people who really care about the content will hopefully subscribe?
How richer app features are evolving
Audio has become table-stakes for our publishers, which I think is awesome. Some 30% of our publishers have an audio-centric user experience now as part of their app, and it really makes a difference to time spent.
There’s two types of audio consumption: podcasts, which are brilliant for engagement and does feel like a more differentiated product, and the text-to-speech, read my article [ones].
Something that we’re seeing getting real engagement, with an increasing number of our publishers doing it, is ‘Read the top five stories to me’, and it literally just cues them up. I think that’s such a nice, simple, time-saving feature that people are starting to really engage with.
Funnily enough, video is the one that still feels weirdly nascent in the apps. 22% of our publishers are using video as a primary means to deliver content. 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.
Social media has trained everybody on consuming [vertical video]. But also as a news organisation creating video for that channel like the Baltimore Banner, people were consuming their vertical video 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.
The opportunity gap in publisher apps
Let’s say you’re a reader revenue business, the percentage of subscribers using the app on a monthly basis – you would be amazed at the breadth of performance across our portfolio. The Spectator, they have nigh on 90% of their subscriber base using the app every month.
So you take that data point, and you look at other subscriber businesses where they’re closer to 30%. 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.
The publishers we see really putting effort into their app…it’s very clear that those apps perform considerably better than the ones who launch an app and let it flow. There has to be an investment for these things to 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 Stylist, like The Spectator, like The Independent, you see remarkable results.
This Conversations episode is sponsored by Pugpig.
Pugpig is the leading mobile publishing platform powering 400 apps for over 150 publishers globally spanning news media, consumer magazines and B2B. Our platform allows media brands to launch deeply engaging mobile apps that significantly drive up reader revenue and retention.
Cultivating direct relationships with readers and focusing on reader revenue are the number one priority for publishers. This is where Pugpig apps come in: we provide the most beautiful and effective way to engage publishers’ most valuable audience, to build habit and to retain them for as long as possible.
Learn more and download Pugpig’s 2026 Media App Report at pugpig.com
