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August 2, 2024
GearJunkie.com is a subsidiary of AllGear Digital, focused on daily updates and reviews of outdoor gear.
They monetise traffic using an affiliate and advertising model, and a key audience development priority for them is growing their newsletter and reaching new audiences
We had the chance to sit down with Ashley Toering, Senior Audience Development Manager at AllGear Digital, to chat about her experience with FlatPlan and Apple News.
GearJunkie had an Apple News channel prior to working with FlatPlan, but felt that their external partner at the time did not provide enough strategic support:
“Before FlatPlan we were using a different company...we weren't coached through the setup process. We weren't clear on how to optimize our channel, and our content wasn't really up to par with the other content on Apple News.”
This was frustrating as their team felt as if GearJunkie wasn’t reaching its full potential on Apple News:
“We had seen good results syndicating our content to other platforms beyond Apple News, so it was really hard for us to see our numbers on Apple News so low.”
GearJunkie views Apple News as a platform to reach new audiences and improve the discoverability of their content.
“We are using Apple News to get our content in front of a new engaged audience who might not have otherwise heard of us.
Loyal readers we see on Apple News will continue to read our content on the platform and then potentially click a link within our articles to get back to our site.”
Their team aims to convert their Apple News audience into newsletter subscribers, which creates more opportunities to promote their content and affiliate links.
“To drive newsletter signups, we did work with FlatPlan to implement an in-article CTA… it links back to our signup newsletter form right on the GearJunkie site.”
The entire onboarding and setup process for FlatPlan was completed in one month, with no involvement from GearJunkie’s tech team.
One important aspect for the GearJunkie team was ensuring that their Apple News channel matched the branding of their owned publication:
“We really want it to be a seamless experience for people. So if they are viewing us on Apple News for the very first time, and then they hop over to gearjunkie.com, we want to make sure that they don't feel they have somehow come up on a different site.”
“I don't recall having to ever involve our own engineering teams, which was great…all we had to do was answer a few questions and approve some designs, but it was very, very seamless and easy.”
GearJunkie saw a significant lift to article views and followers within 3 months
Since onboarding, GearJunkie has driven 1.5M article views on Apple News in the last 6 months.
GearJunkie has also benefited from FlatPlan’s Follow CTAs, which have helped grow followers by 20% in the same period.
“Our biggest surprise was honestly just how quickly we saw an improvement to our metrics after making the switch to FlatPlan.”
We were not sure if it would be 30 days or a year before we saw those changes, but within about three months, we started to see our numbers grow, and it surprised us in the best way.”
“Our favorite thing about working with the team is that everyone has genuinely been really helpful, responsive, and knowledgeable from the get go.
Alice Whitehead [Project Manager] was so great…she was thorough, helped us understand where our content was lacking, and told us the steps we could take in order to improve the viewability of our articles”
And overall, I just feel like FlatPlan had a very sophisticated approach to getting us set up with ease, incorporating those CTAs in our articles for newsletter signups, and then just helping us grow overall.”
No matter what stage you're at in your discovery of Apple News, we'll help you get the information you need to make the right decision for your media business.
