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How Hearst UK and Stylist use app extra features to enhance reader relationships

Apps can be a powerful retention tool for subscription publishers. If they want readers to come back regularly, having enhanced features and added extras like games can be key to building habits and making the app ‘sticky’. However, content must always be at its heart.

At the Publisher App Summit in June, Hearst UK’s Product Lead Emma Peagam and The Stylist Group’s Digital Content Director Felicity Thistlethwaite discussed how their own enhanced apps help retention, their onboarding strategies, and finding a balance between additional features and a simple user experience.

The Publisher Summits covered four product areas across two days in London, from newsletters and print to apps and podcasts, featuring speakers from The Economist and DMG Media to Reach, National World, Grazia and more.

You can listen to the full session below, or search for The Publisher Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

Building retention with games

The power of games in apps is well-documented, from the New York Times’ dedicated Games app and subscription, to those who bake it into the app, like The Telegraph and The Guardian, who have a new Puzzles hub in their relaunched app.

But news publishers aren’t the only ones who can see value from engaging users with games. According to Pugpig’s Media App Report 2025, 18% of publishers currently have games in their app. B2C publisher Stylist, who launched their redesigned app in April last year, saw a fit for gaming functionality as part of their focus on an app which would serve their community.

“We looked at the app and everything else we were offering and [looked] to really understand why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Thistlethwaite told the Publisher App Summit. Their app now has a VIP area for their top tier of subscribers, varying levels of functionality for other subscription tiers, and both games and site content available in the app for free. It now stands at 25,000 downloads.

The publisher decided to offer the games for free as a test to see if it influenced subscription take-up and user engagement. “Games are one of our best retention tools,” Thistlethwaite shared. “More subscribers play the games, which is really interesting, but game users in general are twice as likely to come back to the app.” 

Thistlethwaite explained that the average app user who played puzzles – both subscriber and non-subscriber – had an 85% greater retention rate over 30 days compared to those who didn’t play puzzles. “When we look at the value of our apps, and the lifetime value of our users who play the games, that’s quite something,” she noted.

Their games offering doesn’t just encourage retention. It also brings users into a deeper relationship with the written content. “If you play puzzles, you read 68% more articles a week [than a non-puzzle reader],” Thistlethwaite noted.

A common criticism of the New York Times and other publishers who add games is that readers are then engaging with the puzzles rather than the journalism. But Thistlethwaite sees games as part of a person’s journey with the brand. Citing Muj Ali’s earlier app session from the FT, she said that readers come to the publication at different points in the day wanting different things.

 “There’s going to be a time and a place to understand the changes to the abortion law that’s coming up this month…and we at Stylist will cover that,” she explained. “There’s also going to be a time and place when you’re on a train and you don’t want to read anything, so we’ve got a podcast for you, or there’s a game. All of these things are there because the women that read our app have told us that they are multifaceted.”

Stylist’s next step will be to try paywalled puzzles within the app. Thistlethwaite acknowledged that she isn’t sure how app users will respond, but given the strong engagement, it’s an obvious place to experiment and test.

Creating utility, but keeping it simple

One theme which came up throughout the Publisher App Summit was the importance of seeing apps as a utility tool, not just a place for content. But Hearst UK’s Emma Peagam had some learnings to share about striking the right balance as a publisher.

Hearst UK’s apps for Men’s Health and Women’s Health were, for a long time, simple digital edition containers. Peagam noted that they weren’t engaging many users or subscribers, so needed a rethink. Firstly, the team created RSS feeds to easily pull in site content. “We saw a huge uplift there, about 140% in terms of [app] downloads,” she shared.

Then the experimentation began. On the two brand apps, Hearst introduced integrated training plans for paying subscribers. “It was a really great lesson for us about who we are as a publisher and what we should be offering to our customers,” Peagam explained. “The training plans are great, and offer all of the features that you would expect from training plans within an app. What we discovered though, is that it’s not necessarily what our customers would want from us.”

She outlined that readers come to Men’s Health and Women’s Health for many reasons; for advice, nutrition, information and community. But there are many competitors who solely focus on training plans, and have app functionality completely geared towards that. Customers came to them saying that the training plans were great, but they had these all in other apps.

When it came to another Hearst brand, Runner’s World, wanting to overhaul their app, Peagam said that the team had learned their lesson: “Instead we thought about, how can we drive a certain level of utility that is bringing users back into the app regularly, as they do when they check content, when they look at our timelines, when they look at their digital editions?” 

Runner’s World already had an archive of pdf training plans online that their running audience loved. Instead of creating an app with “whizzy features,” they instead focused on creating a library of these pdf plans which users could easily have to hand on their phones. “[Members] go on this journey where they say, ‘I want to learn to run a half marathon, this is the time I want to do it in, and this is how many runs a week I want to do.’ Then it shows you your plan, and you can download it,” Peagam outlined, noting how they shifted to personalisation rather than extra features.

The pdf training plan library is exclusive to Silver and Gold subscribers. Just a few months after launching, the app saw a 35% increase in daily usage. “We’ve seen so much growth from [Gold] users especially,” said Peagam. “We thought our mid to lower tiers would be the ones that would see the most growth, but actually it’s that top level, because they see the value in the full package – that’s what they wanted.”

Connecting to the content

The most important lesson Peagam and Thistlethwaite emphasised during the session was that publishers need to keep sight of what their audience want from them when designing any product or launching new features. “We can’t act outside of the content,” Peagam said. “Everything has to uplift and connect to the content in some way.”

She oversees many different brands in Hearst’s portfolio, and explained that different features do well for different apps, as long as content is at the heart. Puzzles have done well in Prima’s app because readers are already used to seeing them in the print magazine and online. Good Housekeeping has a podcast that’s directly tied into recipe and other content, so again users respond well.

That’s not to say extra features in apps can’t contribute. Thistlethwaite is watching carefully how Stylist readers behave with their games, and they keep a constant finger on the pulse of their readership. “What we’re learning about our users from this is helping us define not only the content we make, but the creative and product decisions that we make,” she added.

Whether it’s audio, games, pdf libraries, personalisation or other additional features, the message from both is clear: it has to have audience needs and content at its heart. Any company can make a killer puzzle or workout app. But it is a publisher’s content which sets it apart from the competition.

Thanks to Pugpig and Syno who sponsored the Publisher App Summit. Listen to Felicity and Emma’s session at The Publisher Summits on The Publisher Podcast on your podcast app of choice.

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