I recently test drove a Pushcrew account. Maybe I do not have the dedicated following a Push Notification service demands. If I had that, would I even need push notifications?

Anyways, after about 100,000 visitors to the site, I had around 150 subscribers to my push notifications. I began pushing out notifications – only about one each month.

I tried for about 6 months in a row and the results were always about the same. As an example, on the last push that I sent out:

  • Notification sent to 100 people
  • 30 notifications showed as “delivered”
  • 15 people instantly unsubscribed
  • 0 clicks on notification
  • 0% click through rate

Am I doing it wrong?

I’ve been online since 1998. Before that I was coding. After that I was providing some of the first Internet services. I’ve helped literally tens of thousands of people with computer problems. Am I doing it wrong? If I am doing it wrong I certainly don’t expect anyone else to figure it out. The only notifications I pushed out were for interesting, breaking news about Google – not selling any products or services.

People are subscribing accidentally!

I have some random articles on my site about Snapchat that people find. I’m certain that when I was using a popup for push notification subscriptions that people were accidentally subscribing. Just when you get used to clicking “NO” on the right side, some idiot switches the “NO” to the left side. WTF?

This makes the vast majority of push notifications subscribers worthless. At least in my case.

A push notification, circa 2017.

More news sites using push notifications

Push notifications are becoming as annoying as auto-play videos.

In the 1990s we had flashing borders and spinning cursors. In the 2000s people tried to ruin the internet with banners. Fast Forward to 2017 and 2018 and we have push notifications.

But, before they die, we’ll have “push notification experts” out there telling us all how to achieve success via these notifications which show up in browsers and on smart phones. This will likely signal the last nails in the coffin of the push notification.

Until then…

Ugh.

Len

Leave a Reply