Ask most publishers what makes a great piece of journalism, and they’ll point in the direction of a great hook, newsworthy moment, or unexpected byline. Ask them what keeps audiences returning every day, though, and the answers get vaguer.

For years, publishers have optimised for the single visit — chasing scale from readers who were only ever destined to be “one and done.”

While a great piece of content can still generate a spike in traffic, this alone is not enough to offset the headwinds driven by AI and search decline. Consider, for example, that there’s been an average estimated drop in traffic of 34% since the launch of Google’s AI overviews, according to the Atlantic.

It’s undeniable that, in 2026, a healthy consumer media business needs a stable base of returning, direct traffic. What’s interesting, though, is the most successful publishers sustaining repeat traffic today aren’t relying on content alone. In fact, they are moving away from traditional models.

As many expand beyond articles into broader products and experiences, the smartest recognise they’re competing not just with other publishers, but with the habit-driving fitness, language, and social apps also vying for the same five minutes of someone’s day.

Their trick is to borrow logic from the same playbook: Focus efforts on creating clear triggers and rewards that turn occasional consumption into habitual use. Habitual use translates into increased conversion and retention, ultimately driving the bottom line.

In this article, we look at the five core habit-forming engagement mechanics successful publishers are using to build deeper, more frequent audience relationships.

1. Daily ritual loop

Every morning when I blearily glance at my phone screen, my 15-member family WhatsApp group titled “Wordling Wordlers” is already brimming with notifications. My family is hardly an outlier: Times games were played more than 11 billion times in 2025, with Wordle accounting for 4.2 billion plays.

Since acquiring the Wordle app in 2022, The New York Times has recognised the strongest way to sustain repeat visitation is to become part of someone’s daily routine, and it has aggressively expanded the games offering.

Other publishers followed suit, increasingly noticing their most loyal audiences may be more likely to open an app for a daily crossword than to refresh a home page for breaking news. A previous generation sat down with a pen for the Sunday crossword, but today’s Times’ readers wait for the daily drop, weaving games into commutes, coffee breaks, and family group chats.

Here at Condé Nast, The New Yorker has meaningfully expanded its games offering, making it a core part of our retention and acquisition strategy, rather than a sidebar.

What’s telling is how differently it’s run. The games offering sits behind its own paywall, separate from the journalism, and is measured on an entirely different scorecard: session length, stickiness (daily active users [DAU]/monthly active users [MAU]), and retention curve, rather than the pageviews and time-on-page that govern the rest of the site.

The results speak for themselves: Games now rank among the top three sections for time spent at The New Yorker, with users spending around 25 minutes on crossword pages alone. More than half of players go straight to that section rather than via search or social, leaving the section largely untouched by whatever Google or social platforms do next.

The key here is finding a way for your brand to naturally embed into the daily lives of users. A beauty publisher may not be well-suited to a crossword, for example. However, a daily skincare tracker or a “what to wear today” prompt might tap into the same habit loop far more convincingly.

2. Progression loop

Closely tied to the daily ritual loop is the progression loop. In other words, give users the sense that each reaction is building toward something.

Fitness apps like Strava do this through streaks, goals, and milestones. Language apps like Duolingo achieve this through levels and lesson completion; we all have a friend fiercely protecting day 342 of their Duolingo streak. In fact, Duolingo has done this so effectively that by the end of 2025, the app had about 43 million daily active users maintain streaks of seven days or longer — seriously impressive.

For publishers, the same principle can turn a standalone interaction into an ongoing commitment.

A food publisher’s app, for example, might launch a cooking challenge for readers, rewarding them for hitting a streak of healthy dishes cooked across a week or month. Badges could mark milestones, signal expertise, or even contribute to a visible status within the community, helping identify highly engaged users as trusted contributors when they comment on recipes.

For knowledge-hungry news or culture audiences, the mechanic could be much simpler. Readers might receive a monthly snapshot showing how many articles they’ve read compared with the previous month, which topics they’ve spent the most time with, or how their interests have shifted over time.

The point isn’t necessarily to make the content feel like a game. It’s to make return visits feel cumulative: Each interaction contributes to a visible sense of progress, giving users another reason to come back, and not break the chain.

3. Personalisation loop

The personalisation loop harnesses tools that make a user’s experience more useful, and more engaging as they continue to use it.

We see this often within the entertainment space: Netflix does this through curated selections and daily recommended content, even adapting the cover art of a film or TV show depending on the user’s consumption habits. Spotify does this through learning a user’s taste and surfacing daily and weekly playlist recommendations, tailored to their taste. Its Discover Weekly feature alone has generated more than 100 billion streams since launching and now drives more than 56 million new artist discoveries each week.

This same logic can be carried over to publishers. By creating tailored content feeds based on time spent and frequency that users visit certain content categories, a media brand is able to drive up perceived value and likelihood to return.

For a fashion publisher, a subscriber interested in runway shows would see those new articles at the top of their feed, or receive more relevant push notifications ahead of each fashion week. In contrast, someone interested in celebrity style would be directed on that particular path.

Personalisation can start from the very first interaction. Onboarding quizzes that ask users about their interests allow them to “choose their own adventure” from the outset, while giving publishers valuable signals to shape a more relevant experience over time.

The key is ensuring you have a quality data feed to digest and inform these experiences from the outset. Consumers are savvy, and, if asking for data, we need to make sure it’s worth their time.

4. Curation loop

In a world saturated by infinite content, taste-making and guidance become key to driving deeper engagement. Here, curation can cut through the noise, turning the question of what to browse next into something low-barrier and snackable rather than overwhelming.

Editor-led curation, from “daily editor picks” to “five things worth your time this week,” is an easy way to provide a trusted signal for what’s worth a reader’s time. Contextual curation makes those recommendations feel even more useful by surfacing the right content at the right moment: a fresh summer salad on the hottest day of the year, or a photography archive of New York timed to a major Knicks milestone.

User-led curation is another interesting move. Options like saved articles, recipe boxes, travel wish lists, product collections, and folders allow users to build their own personal library within a publisher’s ecosystem, creating stored value that gives them a reason to return.

Finally, cross-format curation can deepen engagement by bringing articles, videos, podcasts, shopping recommendations, and other formats together around a single interest or need. The result is an experience that feels less like an endless stream of content and more like a useful, considered destination; someone may log on for a single article but return for a related podcast.

5. Community loop

If done well, one of the strongest ways to make a consumer experience sticky is through the community loop. Here, the voice of the community becomes a product in itself, with features designed to let loyal readers emotionally invest, drawing a visible line of affinity between themselves and the brand.

At Condé Nast, we’ve launched commenting across articles, allowing users to share thoughts on everything from their favourite substitute for a recipe on Bon Appétit, to their take on the latest Taylor Swift album on Pitchfork.

Another great example is British lifestyle publisher SheerLuxe. The publisher has cultivated a cult following and has long been focused on harnessing community beyond content alone. Most recently, it has modernised the chat board through the SheerLuxe community app, allowing users to engage with peers and editors on pressing questions like where to host a 30th birthday in London or the hottest beach clubs in Sardinia.

This model has long been established by the likes of Reddit, where additional community features such as “top contributor” badges and upvoting/downvoting could also play a role in making publisher content more appealing to browse. This could work especially well in the lifestyle space, where a beauty brand might let users vote on their favourite sunscreen, or a travel app could give readers the chance to vote for hotel of the year.

Taken together, these are the kinds of features that let loyal readers emotionally invest, drawing a visible line of affinity between themselves and the brand they return to.

The foundational five loops

Five loops: Ritual. Progression. Personalisation. Curation. Community. Increasingly, these are five fundamentals for a modern media business.

Evolving from the traditional publisher model takes a village. Habit is now a product strategy, not just an editorial outcome. With that, it’s essential that product, revenue, and editorial teams work cohesively to build not just a product worth visiting once, but one worth returning to.

The goal here isn’t to turn every publisher into the next Duolingo. It is to identify the natural behaviour a brand can own — whether that’s cooking, solving, trip planning, or discoverability — and make that behaviour repeatable. Great journalism remains the foundation, but the next era of digital publishing will be won by publishers who build in reasons to come back.

The result? Not engagement for engagement’s sake but for stronger audience relationships and higher lifetime value.

Banner image: Adobe stock image by izzetugutmen.

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