Launches

American City Business Journals launches entire portfolio of 40 apps on Pugpig Bolt

United States’ largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies, American City Business Journals (ACBJ), has launched each of their 40 titles on Pugpig Bolt. Read more about what went down…

6th December 2023

United States’ largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies, American City Business Journals (ACBJ), has launched each of their 40 titles on Pugpig Bolt.

With a weekly reach of over 1.3 million readers across the US, they’re investing in apps to build a better user experience for their most loyal audience.

read the full case study

After migrating all 40 publications from their previous app platform (MAZ) over to Pugpig Bolt, we were able to build out all apps with quick turnaround times thanks to our new Pugpig Multi App Manager tool.

This allows us to drastically reduce the time it takes to build multiple apps which use the same layout and integrations, and automatically submit them to App Store Connect & Google Play for even speedier and more accurate app submissions.

Project kick off to all apps being submitted took just four months – an impressive feat for Team Pugpig given the scale of work involved.

For ACBJ, they see high levels of engagement on newsletter content, so we created a dedicated, easily accessible hub to drive sign ups and eventually access all newsletter content within the app, alongside a home for their digital editions and powerful search to improve discoverability.

The app has a seamless integration with push notification platform, Pushly, to allow their push strategy to work hand in hand with the rest of their marketing.

Josh Roten, Senior Director of Commerce & On-Site Marketing at ACBJ said:

“As with any transition, we faced quite a challenge managing the rebuild of 40 Local Market Apps. The Pugpig team and their leadership worked with us each week to accomplish our goals and achieve launch KPIs. I’m excited to say we did just that. We met all goals and have outlined a roadmap for the next few months to take our apps to even greater heights.”

Pugpig CEO, Jonny Kaldor, said:

“After many years working with Advance on their Conde Nast titles, it was with great joy that we took on the ACBJ project in the late summer of 2023. And what a project – the biggest simultaneous rollout of apps that we’ve ever undertaken. I can’t wait to see where we can take the ACBJ team and their 40 brands over the coming years.”

We’re looking forward to improving and evolving these apps in phase two of work. This is likely to centre on fine tuning the editions experience, setting up tiered subscriptions through their auth provider and maybe even some new features…. watch this space!
Take a look at all ACBJ apps on the App Store or Google Play Store or check out the full case study for a deeper look into the apps and their features.