Media Industry: Top PWA Benefits and Examples

The rapid evolution of technology has empowered the world with myriad distinctive tools and solutions. Among them are progressive web applications (PWAs) that have been gaining more and more momentum lately, especially in the news and media industry. PWAs are hybrids of regular websites and mobile apps. They offer some fantastic features: the responsive, safe, and streamlined user experience to ensure the future of web development. Also, they don’t require you to visit an app store even though they may look and behave like native apps.

PWAs have proven to be a huge hit in the news industry since such apps allow companies to ensure users have access to the digital publication even in slow- or no-network situations, offer users the ideal experience on every device, cut down page loading times, and so much more. It might interest you to learn that several leading businesses like Starbucks, The Financial Times, and Pinteres today utilize PWAs to increase user engagement.

Anyway, to better showcase what a progressive web app can do for media and news companies, here is a quick look at some of the key benefits of this advanced technology-driven solution:

1. Responsive design: PWAs are engineered to deliver the optimal user experience, no matter the device through which a given PWA is being accessed.
2. Cost savings: Progressive web apps are also conducive to the realization of significant development cost savings.
3. Ease of maintenance: Since PWAs bypass different platforms’ app stores, it becomes that much easier for companies to maintain the app as well as push out updates to improve user experience.

However, these and the other potential benefits of progressive web apps for the news and media industry will be best demonstrated via some real-life examples of PWAs at work in the sector. So, here goes:

1. Twitter Lite: Let us start with what is among the biggest names in the new-age digital realm: Twitter. In addition to the standard app and website, the company also offers a Twitter Lite iteration of the social media platform. Twitter Lite brings together the best of both worlds, i.e. progressive web apps and native apps, allowing the offering to deliver a substantially-improved user experience, reduced data consumption, top-notch user engagement, and so much more.
2. The Weather Channel: Around the 1980s, The Weather Channel serves an average of 40 billion requests every single day. Inducting a progressive web app into its arsenal allowed the channel to realize an 80 percent improvement in page load time, support more than 60 languages, and leverage push notifications among other things.
3. Forbes: Decidedly among the leading digital business publications across the US and the world, Forbes had been facing quite a bit of issues with the native apps they offers. From poor loading speed to sky-high bounce rates, the native apps were just not cutting it for Forbes anymore. So what did the company decide to do? Switched to PWA, of course; with PWA, the company quickly realized a plethora of benefits, including a 2x growth in user retention and engagement rates, reduced page loading time, a 3x increase in scroll depth, etc.

There is no denying that companies in the new-age news and media industry must contend with an especially cut-throat market. With evolved customer preferences, the prevalence of mobile devices, and other such factors, companies in the media sector need all the help that technology has to offer.

As demonstrated via the above discussion, progressive web apps are among the top such tools that can help news and media companies successfully tend to their customers’ demands and gain an edge over their contemporaries. So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start looking for a trusted PWA development services company right away!

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