This past week, HBO's John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, poked fun at the ways different organizations make use of push notifications.

His five-minute web episode was centered on how organizations send irrelevant push notifications to subscribers that serve to distract rather than to inform. When talking about push notifications, John Oliver recognized the power that push notifications have to quickly and succinctly spread important news across a wide user-base but believed that various organizations were misusing this effective communication tool.

During his Last Week Tonight segment on push notifications, he presented two principles of how and when push notifications make sense:

  • Is there something I should be doing differently? Is it actionable?
  • Is there something I need to know now? Is it time-sensitive?

In this situation, John Oliver makes two strong points on how push notifications should correctly be used:

  1. Push notifications should be relevant to the subscriber and provide information that the recipient can act on.
  2. Push notifications should be time-sensitive. The information included in the notification should be relevant to current events that the subscriber should know about.

As the market-leading solution for push notifications, OneSignal has hundreds of thousands of customers who send push notifications every day. On average, over 5 billion push notifications are sent daily through OneSignal’s platform.

While some OneSignal users work diligently to personalize each notification and explicitly ask their users about frequency and type, there are other users of the OneSignal product who aren’t as sensitive to the needs of their subscribers.

In order to combat this misuse of push notifications, we at OneSignal take an active role in educating the 850,000+ users of the product to help them send better push notifications that are more time-sensitive, actionable, and informative. OneSignal strives to be the intelligent layer of communication where push notifications create opportunities for organizations to develop the relationships that they have with their users.

We appreciate John Oliver for sharing his opinion on push notifications and we agree with him on what was discussed within the segment. We hope that the continued circulation of the video on the web will help educate users on the power of push notifications and the impact that they can have if used correctly.

PS: If you’re John Oliver (or if you’re the corporate overlord HBO) and you’re looking for a push notification platform to send some relevant timely notifications that update subscribers about your shows (we think new episode notifications of Last Week Tonight would be both timely and relevant!), let us know and we'll hook you up. It definitely won't cost you as much as your recent purchase of Russell Crowe's “costume”