News & media
Push notification best practices for news and media sites
How often to send, what subscribers signed up for, what holds their attention and the mistake that loses it, for news and media sites.
Updated · By the SharePush team
- Usual cadence
- 7–28 campaigns a week
- How solid this is
- Independent research Drawn from a published study of real publishers, cited below.
What do people expect from push notifications on news and media sites?
They opted in to hear something before they would have found it themselves. Anything they could have read at their leisure is a notification you spent for nothing.
How often should news and media sites send push notifications?
The usual band is 7–28 campaigns a week. Roughly 1–4 alerts a day. Publishers that hold engagement cap themselves; the ones that do not are visibly at the other end.
That band is a starting point, not a target. Your own click rate is the better judge: it moves before the unsubscribes do.
A hard cap, set explicitly to avoid app uninstalls.
The other end of the same study.
What works on news and media sites
- Set a hard daily cap and treat it as a budget, not a target. Deciding what does NOT get an alert is the whole discipline.
- Separate breaking news from everything else, and let people take one without the other.
- Write the alert so it is useful even if it is never tapped; a headline that only teases costs you trust.
- Overnight sends need a higher bar than daytime ones: the same story is worth less at 3am than the interruption costs.
What is the most common push notification mistake on news and media sites?
Alert inflation. A newsroom that pushes every story trains its audience that no alert is urgent, and the ones that actually matter get ignored with the rest.
The rules every site shares
Your sector changes the volume, not the rules. Chrome runs three systems against every site that sends web push (on-device spam warnings, automatic permission revocation and push API rate limits), and the same five habits keep you clear of all of them.
- Earn the permission before you ask for it The prompt itself is scored. A low acceptance rate pushes you into Chrome’s quieter UI and counts against you in the rate-limit formula.
- Treat volume as a budget, not a lever Volume is only half of every Chrome penalty: the other half is time spent on your site. Five pushes a day is fine for a daily-visit audience and disruptive for a once-a-month one.
- Write copy the classifier does not flag The model reads your title, body and buttons. It was trained largely on synthetic examples, so it is unpredictable: write like a newsroom, not like an ad.
- Send to the people who asked for that thing Relevance is the only input you fully control that raises engagement and lowers volume at once. It fixes both sides of the ratio Chrome measures.
- Prune before Chrome prunes you A dead subscriber is not neutral. They are the denominator dragging your engagement ratio under the revocation threshold, and they take the live subscribers down with them.