Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices. The podcast is on a break for a few weeks now while we plan our next season, and focus on The Publisher Summits. Missed an episode? Catch up here or search ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.

Don’t miss 2025’s Publisher App Summit on 11th June, featuring speakers from Stylist, City A.M., The FT and more.

Topics include: the latest mobile publishing trends and the opportunities for publishers, push notification strategies, launching apps to grow non-core audiences, and how added extra features can enhance reader relationships.

How publishers are using apps to deepen engagement and improve retention

For some publishers, apps are quickly becoming one of the most effective tools in a product portfolio for enhancing their relationships with core readers and subscribers. Whether it’s improved retention rates or a premium reading experience, organisations are reaping the benefits of app investment.

Ahead of The Publisher App Summit on June 11th, we’re spotlighting how leading news publishers are using apps in smart ways to connect with readers and drive long-term value.

City A.M.: Editor-driven push notifications

UK business news publisher City A.M. has been running experiments with push notifications since launching their app in late 2023. A report from app provider Pugpig noted that they had gained over 50,000 dedicated users a year after launching. Not only this, but their average push notification rate was 37% higher than the median open rate of other best-performing apps in Pugpig’s ecosystem.

This success with push has been credited to three main factors. Firstly, City A.M.’s app push notifications are managed by an editor. “He knows our audience well,” managing editor Rupert Hargreaves said in the report. “This is not a random exercise. We focus on things that do really well and have shown success in the emails.”

Hargreaves also pointed out that although they are often in competition with other publishers for big news stories, they try and focus push notifications on the stories where they have an edge, and can bring something unique and interesting.

Finally, their experiments have shown that generic business news doesn’t perform as well as tax and budget stories which affect their core audience; small business owners and mid-level managers who may not have the resources to stretch to an FT subscription. City A.M.’s next app goal is to roll out push notification targeting, something they hope will allow them to engage larger subsets of their app users.

Zetland: From audio tests to audio apps

Danish news start-up Zetland decided on an app because of an unexpected demand for audio from their readers. Following the successful introduction of an HTML play button on online articles, the team came up with a new product vision: that Zetland should be as consumable via audio as it was via text. 

Rather than simply putting audio on existing platforms like Spotify or Apple, the subscription-driven publisher built their own app as a way to keep users within their own ecosystem and maintain the paywall. 45% of Zetland’s subscribers are in their 20’s and 30’s, with the audio and app experience credited as having a large part in this success.

The vast majority of listening now happens within their app. “We maybe thought we could get 20% of our audience to use audio,” CEO Tav Klitgaard told The Publisher Podcast. “But very quickly we were at 50%, and now we’re above 80%.”

Klitgaard now regards Spotify and other big audio players as the competition; whoever users might choose when sitting in the car and looking for a news update to listen to. 

FT Edit: A taster app as a product in its own right

Many publishers launch apps with the aim of offering all online content to readers, perhaps with some enhancements. But the FT has taken the opposite approach with its FT Edit app, which it launched in early 2022.

The FT is one of the pricier subscription offerings, starting at £39 a month for access to all its business and financial reporting. But they also cover a wide range of non-financial news, which leaves a potentially vast market of untapped potential subscribers who don’t see themselves as right for a full business subscription.

The FT Edit app offers just eight hand-picked FT stories a day, including news, analysis and features. It’s free on iOS for the first 30 days, then is priced at $0.99 for the first 6 months, and $4.99 after that. 

In an interview for A Media Operator, Editor Hannah Rock said that despite offering FT Edit alongside the premium subscription, the cheaper app wasn’t cannibalising subscriptions. “What we’ve actually found is that there are far more readers who go the opposite direction,” she said. “They come in via FT Edit, they like what they see, and they upgrade, which is really quite exciting. Because this has been without almost any encouragement from us. It’s been purely organic.”

The app has also proved to be a valuable retention tool. Around 88% of those who complete the 30 day trial go on to the $0.99 price point for a further six months. Of those who continue for the full six months, 85% then go on to pay the ongoing $4.99 monthly subscription.

The Baltimore Banner: Apps as ‘table stakes’ for news organisations

Local news start-up The Baltimore Banner launched in 2022 with a ‘generous runway’ of money from a local philanthropist. But as vice president of product Eric Ulken explained to The Publisher Podcast, they had to prioritise development of sustainable revenue streams.

Focusing on potential sources of reader revenue first and foremost led the team to launch the website, and an app followed very shortly after. “My first question [when I joined] was, why an app? Why so soon? Why not get the web right first?,” Ulken said. “But I think the app play turned out to be really smart, because apps have become table stakes for news organisations, especially subscription-driven news organisations today.”

To set a news product apart and make it worth paying for, Ulken believes users expect an app as part of a premium experience, much like Netflix or Spotify. “The app, I think, in many ways has a brand value in the sense that it conveys to people that we are a serious organisation that has some staying power and is investing in a platform that is going to be around for a while,” Ulken added.

Untapped potential

One of the primary reasons we launched the Publisher App Summit is that we kept coming across stories like these, but found many publishers were still fairly dismissive of the potential of apps – understandable, given the experiences of the early 2010’s. 

Apps aren’t going to bring in thousands of new subscribers, or save the news industry. But for publishers looking to prove the value of a subscription, build regular habits, and move the needle on retention, apps are proving a powerful tool.

Whether you have an app already and want strategies to take it to the next level, or you’re a publisher contemplating if an app is right for you, you’ll get a lot out of the Publisher App Summit. 

Join us on 11th June at Vauxhall Arches in London.

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