To better serve time-pressed readers, Mediacorp’s international news arm, CNA, introduced a new experience for readers to engage with its Web site and app.   

In March 2024, it rolled out a feature called FAST, which users can activate with the click of a button to swipe through bullet-point summaries of the day’s top stories.

The intuitive swiping experience in FAST was designed to mimic familiar controls and interactions in social media platforms. Summaries are generated with the help of AI integration in our CMS, and journalists finesse and regenerate the points if they are not satisfied with the result.

Users can click through to the full story while browsing.

Instant appeal

Within a month of its launch, FAST added millions of additional pageviews to CNA, and we saw a healthy click-through rate of 20% to read the full stories.

About 22% of app users use FAST regularly.

To help users build a habit of visiting the site, this year, we started sending out app notifications for top stories in FAST twice a day, one during the morning commute and one in the evening.

We ran experiments over two months, testing everything from timing to tone to style of writing for the call to action. We found messages sent twice a day instead of once resulted in a 40% increase in daily average pageviews from FAST and nearly 100% increase in daily average UVs for the feature. 

FAST accounted for 10% of CNA’s mobile app pageviews with alerts sent out twice a day.

Lasting results

“FAST is one of the most impactful features we’ve launched in recent times, and the response from our users has been phenomenal,” said Nachiappan Muthukumar, senior product manager at Mediacorp. “Once they enter the FAST experience, they seamlessly go on to consume nine stories in a session — that’s nearly four times higher than our regular articles. Our current focus is driving wider adoption so even more users can enjoy this engaging way of experiencing CNA content.”

Anil Nair, lead for digital news products at Mediacorp, explained the success of the app: “We introduced FAST as an easy-to-read format for the time-poor reader. Turns out that readers have time if you surface the right content in the right format,” he said.

See the CNA app in action by downloading it here.

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