Impact

+1400% audience growth over 14 month period
+8MM user per month reach on the platform
+2MM user receiving push notifications
20% lift to publisher's total audience (via Comscore)

Overview

The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard were launch partners when Apple News went live in September 2015 with the release of iOS 9.1. The channels started in the basic RSS format, but were soon transitioned to Apple’s standardized Apple News Format via Markdown in October 2015.

I was given product ownership of the Apple News platform in late February 2016. Up until that point, our articles were plagued with bugs, our POCs at Apple were not happy with our development velocity, we were seeing little to no user growth MoM, and we couldn’t even support video assets. Clearly, we had our work cut out for us.

The Secret to Success: Clean Data, Clean Designs, Relationship Building

We implemented a steady stream of strategically planned product rollouts. THR & Billboard doesn't have the development resources of some of our larger publishing rivals, and as such we have to be very selective as to where we invest our resources.

We started by delivering a single, simple article template.
We transitioned our video production process to an HTML5 delivery mechanism to enable video support.
We optimized article ingestion by moving our Apple News Format JSON from Markdown to HTML format.
Once our ingestion was clean, we were cleared to join the pilot push notifications program.
After that we moved into enhancements for our template with delightful animations, support for ‘Cover Images’, and in feed video playback to name a few.
Finally, we used lessons we learned from the single article template to inform builds of lists, video and gallery templates.