• by Ray Schultz , October 20, 2022

News organizations have become addicted to flash push alerts. It’s not clear that readers are too -- although they must opt in to receive the alerts.

Airship data shows publishers on its platform sent an aggregate of 446 billion push alerts in 2021 -- a 2% increase over 2019, and 28% more than 2018, the British publication Press Gazette reports.    

Queen Elizabeth’s death led to an additional two billion notifications being sent between Sept. 7-19, compared with the prior year, the report continues. 

The traffic hit from push alerts means “most publishers are now using them every day, regardless of whether the content they are promoting is worth the news-flash treatment." 

Open rates now top 2%, compared to around 1% in 2018. 

Between Sept. 16 and Oct. 1 of this year, news organizations sent the following numbers of alerts:

• Washington Post—147 
• Telegraph—140 
• My London—125
• Yorkshire Live—123 
• BBC—116
• New York Times—112 
• Manchester Evening News—110 
• Mail Online--110
• Chronicle—103
• CNN—98 
• The Sun—85 
• Echo—77
• Lancs Live—76
• Insider—76
• AP—73
• Mirror—70
• Sky—66%
• Bloomberg—61 
• Leeds Live—48
• Guardian--45