news.com.au launches redesigned app with new 'Swipe or Scroll' navigation
Pippa Leary explains how killing off 'empty reach' leads to a swipe-first app redesign and a 15-fold jump in ad revenue.
“So when you use the app, you get to choose your own adventure. You swipe or scroll.”
That’s Pippa Leary’s pitch for news.com.au’s redesigned mobile app. It’s also the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year push to move the publisher away from what she calls “empty reach” and towards readers who stick around.
The app is built around a new dual-navigation feature, ‘Swipe or Scroll’, which lets readers flick through social-style visual cards covering news, sport, lifestyle, finance, technology and travel, or stick with a more traditional scrolling feed.
The app launches under the platform ‘Get the app that gets you’, with News Corp Australia claiming the card-based format is a first for a major Australian news publisher.
There’s also a bigger push into reader interaction.
A new ‘Most Commented’ module surfaces the homepage’s most-discussed stories, ‘Featured Comments’ places selected reader responses inside articles, while emoji reactions give readers another way to weigh in.
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Killing ‘empty reach’
For Leary, who was appointed managing director and publisher of News Corp Australia’s free news and lifestyle division in 2024, the new app is part of a strategy that began long before anyone started talking about swiping.
“About two and a half years ago, we made a real strategic change and wanted to really focus on engagement rather than what we call empty reach,” she told Mediaweek.
“We were looking at lots of publishers just killing themselves by trying to grab all kinds of clicks from search and social.”
Instead, news.com.au began measuring what Leary calls “engaged reach”: total page views divided by unique audience, using Ipsos iris data.
“We came up with this idea of engaged reach, which is PVs (Page Views) divided by UAs (Unique Audience), and they really, really tuned into it,” Leary said of the editorial teams.
“For them, in many ways, it was a relief because they could get away from writing clickbait and they actually really focused on writing deeply engaging stories for everyday Australians.”
The calculation was simple: a reader who deliberately comes back is far more valuable than someone who arrives through search or social, reads one story and disappears.
Why the app matters
That distinction becomes particularly stark when Leary looks at how people use news.com.au across different platforms.
“Direct traffic is worth so much more in terms of engagement and client outcomes than traffic coming from search or social,” she explained.
And the app sits at the top of that hierarchy.
“Someone can come to news.com.au on the mobile web, and they will, on average, look at 20 pages per month. If someone comes to us through the app, they look at 200 to 220 pages a month.”
That tenfold difference explains why news.com.au has spent so much time trying to turn its app into something readers actively choose to open.
“It makes the app your strongest, most powerful way to become a self-sufficient, profitable, scalable company in the future,” Leary said.
However, there was a fairly significant catch: news.com.au struggled to make money from it.
Fixing the app’s ad problem
“We really put all our effort into the app. But one huge problem remained. We couldn’t monetise it for ads. It’s very difficult to do targeting within the app environment,” Leary said.
That changed with an upgrade rolled out in July 2025, when News.com.au began using its own first-party data to improve targeting inside the app rather than relying on third-party trackers.
The impact was immediate.
“We made that change behind the scenes in July last year,” Leary says. “And we saw our daily ad revenue from the app increase by 15 times.”
With the plumbing fixed, attention turned to what readers could actually see.
An app stuck in 2019
“The UI (User Interface) and the UX (User Experience) were still from 2019,” Leary said. “It was still old school. It was really just a reimagining of what you see on the desktop on a phone, and that’s not how people use their apps.”
news.com.au began looking at what Leary calls the “micro moments” in which people now consume news: those short bursts between everything else competing for their attention.
“They want to get the information they want in these, what we’re calling like micro moments in their lives,” she said.
“And they need to get in and get out kind of quickly, but know that they’re getting the right information.”
The answer became ‘Swipe or Scroll’.
“We know that our older, rusted audiences love scrolling. But we know that younger audiences, swiping is native because of social,” Leary said.
“We didn’t go one or the other, because in order to give one audience what they want, we don’t want to take away the experience of the other one.”
The visual cards also allow News.com.au to move readers through more stories, faster.
“It’s a much higher story velocity,” Leary said. “You’re just swiping through on these stories… we’re telling the stories very immediately and very visually.”
The advertising play
The redesign also includes a new suite of advertising products, including live polls, surveys, shake-to-reveal brand interactions, and an upgraded Glass Leaderboard overlay.
The key product is ScrollX Duo, the first iteration of the ScrollX format that can carry targeting inside the app.
“What we can say to our clients is, buy with us once,” Leary said.
“With the ScrollX Duo, you get the breadth of reach with the mobile web… but you’re going to get the depth of targeting and engagement with the app. So you get both at once. That’s why we called it a Duo.”
The numbers behind the bet
The relaunch is being backed by a national campaign under the ‘Get the app that gets you’ platform, spanning digital, social, audio, radio, television and out-of-home.
That includes buses, train stations and a 3D billboard in central Melbourne shot from the perspective of a phone.
News Corp Australia says app users were 10 times more engaged than web users between January and April 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, based on Adobe Analytics data.
In the June 2026 Ipsos iris rankings, News.com.au recorded an audience of 11.08 million and 292 million browser page views, averaging 26 page views per person.
Two and a half years after Leary began pushing news.com.au away from chasing clicks for clicks’ sake, the app is becoming the clearest expression of that strategy.
The bet is that readers won’t just arrive. They’ll come back again, and again.
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