Difference between subscribed to content and application

Subscribed to Content is identifying subscriptions to individual forum threads, blogs posts etc..  Subscribed to Application is for subscriptions to an entire forum or blog.

To add to this, subscribing to an Application will subscribe you to notifications of new content created within that application. Subscribing to an individual Content will subscribe you to notifications of new comments/replies created for that content.

ah right ok.. I'm not sure how this works on our platform, as we don't consciously subscribe to anything, so I'm just trying to understand what the reporting stats for this are working on. For the subscribe to application, could this be the same as joining a group? And for the content, can this mean also creating a post or event?  

Yes, certain actions like joining a group, creating an application, creating content, commenting on content, will subscribe the user automatically to respective application/content. Some of these are configurable or can be disabled, for instance:

• Wiki comment auto subscribe plugin
• Forum Auto Subscriber
• Calendar Event Auto Subscription Plugin

Ok understood - thank you!