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Talk · UC Berkeley · Nov 6, 2023

How a news app decides what to push you

My part of a SmartNews talk on recommendation systems. The other sections covered how the feed is ranked and how content quality is judged. Mine was push notifications.

01 · Why push
  1. 01
    Keep people informedBreaking news is the obvious one. If something big happens, you should hear it from us.
  2. 02
    Help them build a habitA push at the right moment is what turns an app you installed into one you open every day.
  3. 03
    Send what's relevantA push interrupts someone. It has to be worth it, so we try to send stories each person actually cares about.
  4. 04
    Bring people backEvery tap is a visit to the app, and visits are how a free news app pays for itself.
02 · Who picks the story

Every push is picked by a person or by the algorithm.

A person on the news team chooses the story and hits send. Everyone in the audience gets the same push, at the same time. This is how breaking news goes out.

SmartNews runs 8+ types of push on top of these two.

03 · What a push is made of

Five parts. Each type mixes them differently.

Tap opens → the story
Who picks it
A person
When
The moment it happens
Label
“Breaking News”
Body
One headline
Tap opens
The story
04 · The tradeoff
New users who uninstallMost of them leave because of push.
Revenue from new usersMost of it also comes from push.
More: more visits, more people turning push off
EngagementChurnShape only. Not real data.

We ran this test dozens of times, sending people fewer or more pushes, and cut it every way we could: platform, marketing campaign, reinstalls. The pattern held every time. More pushes, more engagement. More pushes, more people leaving.

05 · The levers

Six levers decide what lands on your phone. Five change how often people come back. One changes how long they stay.

The push budget: how many pushes one person gets in a day.
5
More pushes, more visits. Also more people turning push off or leaving. The tradeoff above, in one slider.