The quiet app advantage for publishers: super users, anonymous audiences, and the measurement gap (Pugpig)

Original article (source): Pugpig, “Super users and silent audiences – inside the 2026 Media App Report” (July 9, 2026)

• https://www.pugpig.com/2026/07/09/super-users-and-silent-audiences-inside-the-2026-media-app-report/

The core idea

Apps are one of the few channels where publishers (and plenty of subscription businesses) still own the relationship end-to-end, but a lot of teams still treat the app like a “reader” rather than a habit and revenue product.

Pugpig’s report combines benchmarks across 440+ apps with a publisher survey and lands on a simple tension:

• engagement is improving (especially time spent)
• conversion, onboarding, and measurement are still lagging, so teams cannot prove or grow the app’s business impact

Engagement is up, driven by richer formats

The standout trend is a lift in engagement, with the clearest change being:

• longer average session duration, and
• higher total time spent per user per month

Pugpig attributes this to richer experiences (audio, video, personalisation), and calls out formats like games as a strong marker of committed usage.

For app marketers outside publishing, the translation is: when you add “reasons to come back that are not your core transaction”, you create a subset of users who massively out-index on engagement.

The big blocker: anonymous usage + weak conversion journeys

Across the dataset, Pugpig highlights a large slice of users who are:

• non-subscribers, and often
• effectively anonymous

Those users behave very differently to paying users. The opportunity is to build better registration/onboarding, plus smarter paywall or conversion flows, so anonymous usage becomes a pipeline, not a dead end.

Push is under-leveraged (not under-installed)

Pugpig notes push opt-in can be healthy, but open rates are often low. That points to the usual suspects:

• relevance (segmentation)
• cadence
• creative/positioning

Push is still one of the few “owned” levers that can reliably move habit. Most teams just do not run it like a product.

Tiny win

Pick one metric you can actually tie to business outcomes this week:

• % of app users who become known (registration) within 7 days, and
• % of known users who hit a “commitment” event (save, follow, subscribe, first purchase, etc.)

Then build one small intervention:

• a single onboarding prompt, triggered once, that asks for registration at the moment of highest intent.

Read the original: https://www.pugpig.com/2026/07/09/super-users-and-silent-audiences-inside-the-2026-media-app-report/