News

Pugpig celebrates its 10th birthday (finally!)

Pugpig celebrates its birthday in style with customers, partners, team members and alumni at the M Den in Threadneedle Street, London

18th October 2021

Photo credit: Matt Alexander/PA Wire

After six months of waiting, last Thursday we finally got together a room full of publishers, partners, team members and alumni at the M Den in Threadneedle Street to celebrate ten years of Pugpig!

Ten and a bit years ago, four of us sat in a very large and very empty office in Gray’s Inn road, eager to kick off our next big project, to build a brand new publishing platform called Pugpig. And we’ve spent the last ten years, slowly but surely, growing. Brand by brand. Every win, every launch taking a huge amount of work by everyone on the team.

So where are we now?
– We live in 2 offices (London and New York),
– with 40 team members,
– looking after 120 publishers,
– who publish 400 apps,
– pushing out 200 TB of content every month.

That’s half a billion individual pages delivered to over 4 million highly engaged (and usually paying) readers around the world. And while that’s a relatively small audience compared to the open web, these folks are so much more valuable: On average, each reader comes back to our apps 14 times a month and they read on average 10 pages per visit over the course of 7 minutes (although a good few of our apps enjoy closer to 20 minutes per session…)

Over the last 12 months, we’ve spent more time than ever evolving our products, and two weeks ago we launched our latest and greatest version of Pugpig Bolt, which I can say with all sincerity is the best mobile app platform for publishers on the market. By a long way.

This is a huge step for us, allowing publishers to launch universal apps that bring together everything from digital editions, replicas, live news, podcasts, videos, ecommerce, membership features and loads more in a way that is completely customisable and extendible – and it’s got an in-app audio player that would embarrass Spotify (and is definitely better than BBC sounds app!)

What’s next?
Over the coming years – more growth (in the USA and Asia Pacific, even better products and a broader offering with a new consulting team who will work alongside our existing product and services teams enabling us to provide a complete end to end service for conceiving, designing, building and running fantastic digital products

So, thank you
To all of our publishers, without whom we would not be here at all.
To our partners, especially Manifesto and InDigital and Piano.
But most of all of course, to Team Pugpig – past and present, who have been truly, truly amazing, who have stuck it out through thick and thin (and there’s been plenty of thin over the last ten years…)
Thank you so much – you are an amazing bunch of people!