Notifications Are The Next Platform

As the world moves from web to mobile, we’ve been thinking deeply about how people will discover mobile products and services and how we will find and access all the things we need in our digital lives.

Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.”

This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and without any real category killers, consumers are swapping new apps in and out at a regular pace.

Most importantly, our engagement is now defined by push-driven notifications rather than the traditional pull-driven experience. We’re “hunting and pecking” through our app grid a lot less; the apps that notify us (without over-notifying to the point of uninstall) are rewarded with our engagement (and our dollars).

Based on this data, our fundamental belief is that notifications represent the future access and discovery point for mobile services — that notifications will be the starting point (or “front door”) for all of the interactions on your phone.

There are a few important trends that are catalyzing this change. As noted above, notificationvolume is increasing at an unprecedented pace (Snowball data shows over 60notifications/day for our Android users).

However, the richness and actionability of notifications is also taking strides forward — both iOS and Android are exposing more actions at the notification panel level, often eliminating the need to go into the app; think of archiving an email or quickly responding to an iMessage. The watch and other connected devices are driving apps to expose lightweight “app-less” interactions, and app operators are now focusing more on user touchpoints than in-app DAUs.

As the world moves from web to apps owning this “front door” represents a huge commercial opportunity; notifications will drive both engagement and revenue for the next generation of mobile companies.

Given this context, Benedict Evans provides a useful framework for thinking about Facebook’s recent efforts to turn messenger into a commercial platform.