On Election Day, ABC News sent a staggering 10 million push alerts to users of the ABC News app who’d signed up for alerts. Peter Roybal, Head of Mobile for ABC News, knew full well that volume of information risked extreme overkill.
But in the weeks leading up to Election Day, the network prompted users to select just how much of that information they wanted to receive–anywhere from merely one key race to the full firehose. “Users who told us they wanted everything received about 45 alerts to their phone’s lock screen informing them the instant the ABC News Decision Desk projected a key race, when we had live video starting of victory or concession speech, or when we determined a race would go to runoff,” Roybal tells TVNewser. “Users who told us they wanted a key update alerts got an editorially curated subset of about 30 alerts.”
“General interest” users, who had not selected any specific Election Day push alert options, received just four breaking news alerts at the biggest moments of the night, such as the Republicans taking the Senate. For statewide races, user’s location information was used to send state-specific alerts. “When users tapped the alerts, they were linked straight into the app to see the continually updating vote counts, exit polls and county-level results,” Roybal said. In all, ABC News crafted more than 500 distinct distinct notifications.
ABC News app users were divided between the “curated” push alerts and getting all of the updates: about 51 percent of users chose key updates only, 49 percent received them all.