What drives you to specific pieces of content? What determines which bits of information you access on any of your devices, mobile or otherwise? For the longest time, we let homepages, search engines, or basic URLs decide our Internet activity.
Today, a simple notification that flashes on your phone’s home screen is one of the most powerful forces leading you from app to app.
As explained by TechCrunch, we’ve used a pull-driven search model for most of our Internet usage in the past. We’ve gone out of our way to find information on different websites, using different search engines as jumping-off points. Now, instead of an active search, that information comes to us—at least, the information we want or need.
There’s a near-infinite supply of stories flooding from our computers and phones, so to combat this excess of mental stimulation, developers are beginning to change their delivery methods from being pull-driven to push-based.
The apps we download, which can be assumed to relate to our interests, push out notifications and pieces of news as they happen. If your cousin just commented on your latest Facebook picture, your phone is going to tell you that before you even get a chance to discover it. If the power forward on your favorite basketball team has just been ruled out for three weeks with an ankle injury, that breaking news will immediately appear on your screen.
These notifications act as the conduit for your Internet activity. Instead of going to a news site’s homepage to search for interesting news, the interesting news comes to you. Site owners don’t need people to continually check out the homepage or open emails to see the daily content anymore.
And multitasking on your phone through the use of these notifications is only getting easier. A user is able to reply to interactions on social media without even exiting the video he’s watching on his phone or an email he’s writing to his boss.
Recent data indicate that open rates can increase as much as 50 percent when marketers use push notifications compared to just email. It’s a more modern, accessible way to reach people, and developers are continuing to understand the advantages as more and more success stories surface.
If you check your phone right now, you might see five or six notifications about new content from Facebook, Twitter, CNN, or ESPN—some of which you could have completely missed without this gentle nudge. You might not always appreciate a friend inviting you to play Candy Crush, but this push-based delivery system is fundamentally morphing how information is both distributed and consumed.
