Jonny Kaldor, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pugpig, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing. Johnny discusses the state of mobile app publishing. Pugpig is a fully-hosted digital publishing platform for sites, web and mobile apps, and television. Jonny Kaldor also talks about the creation of Pugpig, the solutions that it provides to publishers on the mobile app side, ways to utilize Apple News, and popular tech trends publishers should be aware of.
Episode Highlights:
- Jonny Kaldor defines what Pugpig is and does.
- Why does he feel there have been more martech plays coming into the mobile app publishing space?
- What are some of the things that publishers come to Pugpig for?
- What was Jonny’s journey towards creating Pugpig?
- How does Pugpig typically interact with publishers?
- What are Jonny’s thoughts on Apple News traffic?
- Small publishers can benefit from Apple News as well.
- How long did Foreign Affairs take to engage in the mobile app content side?
- What is being done to reach younger users that may not be engaging as much with mobile apps as older users?
- Breaking news is an effective commodity.
- How can digital editions and mobile apps transfer forward, in terms of tech trends?
- In terms of tech stack, is there a push to address the popularity of web apps becoming more mainstream?
- What are Jonny Kaldor’s plans for the future?
3 Key Points:
- The top 10% of publishers actually get the majority of Apple News traffic.
- Jonny Kaldor’s personal preference would be to use Apple News for acquisition and to be very clear that what he is putting on Apple News is a subset of his broader product.
- Have a portfolio of products that you offer on different platforms rather than potentially cannibalizing the same product across platforms.
Tweetable Quotes:
- “We cover news media, publishing, consumer magazines, B2B kind of specialist publishers and also associations and membership organizations.” – Jonny Kaldor
- “Mobile is a huge market. It is where the audience sits. You know, 65% of all digital minutes spent are mobile, and 87% of all mobile minutes are through apps.” – Jonny Kaldor
- “On the consumer magazine side quite often, the existing workflows are all driven around InDesign and print PDF and quite often a consumer magazine publisher won’t have structured content.” – Jonny Kaldor
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