August has rolled in, and summer is almost at a close. At Rest of World, the product team has continued to push out some nifty features while the sun shines (or doesn’t, depending on where in the world you are). This month we’ve added subtle improvements to existing features and have quietly launched a store with official Rest of World merchandise for a limited time period.

What we did 🚀

Beats page updates and trending module

A webpage titled 'Innovation' featuring articles on AI and drug discovery, with three trending stories displayed in colorful boxes, including a focus on China's AI companies and the UAE's advanced AI offerings, along with a summary for an article dated August 2025.

We’ve subtly updated the layout on our Beats pages, added a trending module, and extended the latest stories section so that it seamlessly lazy-loads stories as you scroll down.

The trending module displays the most-viewed stories in that Beat and excludes the most recent stories that are featured above. We’re hoping it’s a helpful way of recirculating some of our readers’ favorite stories from across that Beat.

What is a Beat, you ask? Great question. It’s one of the key topics, subjects, or areas our journalists are focused on reporting on, and gaining expertise and authority in. Although we cover a wide range of topics, we currently have four key Beats and areas of focus that we actively prioritize as part of our coverage: China Outside China, EV Revolution, Innovation, and Tech Giants.

Beats on homepage navigation on mobile

Now that we’ve beefed up our Beats pages, it would be rather nice if people could find them. We’ve now enabled Beats navigation on mobile screens on our homepage. It’s a big improvement to our mobile navigation and will hopefully help more users discover stories by the topics they’re interested in.

Pull Quotes

After some careful design consideration, we’ve modified our pull quotes on stories. We’ve removed the pink underline and added a closing quote. Why, you ask? After having some time to sit with them, we realized that they didn’t need pink or a pop of color to get the point across, and there was potential for them to be mistaken for hyperlinks. We’re vibing with the new clean look (and we hope you like it too!).

comparison of pull quotes before and after. Pull quote on left has pink underline, pull quote on right has no underline and a closing quote
Pull quotes before (on left) and after (on right).

Merch Store

We’ve launched a pop-up merchandise store! The items featured will be on sale for a period of just five weeks (until the end of September!) So if you’d like to nab some official and exclusive Rest of World t-shirts, totes, mugs, or socks—designed by our very own team—you can visit the store here or click on one of the promotional units we currently have dotted around the site. Get them while they’re hot (and available!)

What we learned

Charts

A couple of months back we launched our Charts pages. Since then we’ve seen a 100% uptick in Charts published by our editorial team compared to the previous time period. Users have had an average engagement time of 31 seconds on these pages in the last 30 days (average engagement time on articles is roughly 1 minute, so we consider this to be pretty good for a chart specific page). Users are primarily visiting from desktop (67%), followed by mobile (33%). The highest referrer is Google at 42%, followed by direct referrals at 41%. ChatGPT, our newsletter, and LinkedIn make up the remaining referrals.

Beats

Since we’ve added the Beats homepage navigation to mobile on July 31, Beats page views on mobile have increased by 17% compared to the previous period—a modest increase from a previously modest number, but a positive sign that mobile users are finding our pages. Since we launched the trending module on August 7, the average engagement time on these pages has increased by 4 whole seconds. We’ll take it.

In case you missed it

Our very own Chief Product Officer, Michael Donohoe, will be participating in a panel discussion at the News Product Alliance conference in Chicago this October. If you’re interested in news or news product innovation, grab yourself a ticket and say hello.

Finally…

Did you know that we have an RSS feed? You can use an RSS reader or a tool like Feedly (not a plug) to subscribe to updates. And as always, if you have any questions, thoughts, or feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@restofworld.org (I’m watching that inbox—don’t leave me hanging).

I hope you get a well-earned break this summer (or winter, depending on your hemisphere). As we roll into fall, stay tuned for further updates about our ongoing user research and the opportunity to participate. In the meantime, we’re always happy to take any questions, feedback, or ideas you may have around Rest of World’s product offerings.

Roll on, September. 🍂