How Sing Tao turns disciplined push notifications into deeper reader engagement

Sing Tao operates one of Hong Kong’s largest news app portfolios: Sing Tao Headline, The Standard, East Week, Ohpama, a parenting app, and Job Market. They serve readers who consume news everywhere from the MTR commute to bed at night. Push notifications are the most powerful channel a news app has, but used poorly, they’re also the fastest way to get uninstalled.

The team needed a way to deliver push at the volume that breaking news demands without burning out the readers they were trying to keep engaged.

Sing Tao defines digital success by depth, not reach. Retention rate, engagement rate, and time per session are the numbers that drive product decisions. Those metrics are exactly what push can move, if used carefully.

That philosophy shaped how the team uses OneSignal: fewer, more relevant sends, with segmentation making sure every notification reaches readers who actually want it.

Sing Tao’s segments are built directly from reader behavior, specifically the categories of content each user has previously read in the app. The editorial team builds and selects segments inside the OneSignal dashboard before launching each campaign, giving them tight control over who hears from them and when.

The impact on engagement is striking:

• An 8.5x lift in push CTR — purely from sending the right content to the right reader

The same segmentation engine extends beyond editorial content. Sing Tao uses it to deliver more relevant partner and sponsored content too, so commercial pushes land with readers most likely to be interested. And it’s a win-win— they protect reader trust while making the channel work harder for the business.

On the content side, an AI-powered recommendation system handles personalization at scale, but editorial judgment drives it. Journalists and editors tag content with keywords in the CMS, which trains the data pipeline to understand relationships between articles. The AI personalizes; the newsroom decides what’s worth surfacing.

Segmentation is only half of the equation. Even with the right audiences in place, Sing Tao’s push team is deliberate about what qualifies as send-worthy (major world events, significant Hong Kong stories, breaking developments). That discipline is a big reason CTRs stay healthy even at scale: when Sing Tao sends push notifications, readers know it matters.

What this looks like in practice:

• Hundreds of millions of push notifications sent monthly across Sing Tao’s app portfolio, scaling into the billions during major news cycles
• Millions of app sessions driven by push in a typical month
• Breaking news pushes routinely outperform broadcast sends by several multiples
• Hundreds of millions of events flow into the data pipeline each month, powering segmentation and personalization

OneSignal also powers the dashboard the editorial team uses every day to launch breaking news and promotional pushes, keeping the workflow simple even at massive scale.

Sing Tao’s brands and audience have stayed the same for decades. The way they reach them (disciplined push, behavioral segmentation, and a behavior-based re-engagement) is what keeps the relationship alive.