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A new breed of apps ties unique content and features to revenue strategies

Publisher apps are evolving to leverage unique content and mobile-only functionality to attract and retain subscribers and members.

4th April 2025

The Good Food app from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have premium features part of the group's subscription bundle strategy. Courtesy of INMA

Publisher apps are evolving to offer distinctive content experiences and are being extended from simply displaying content to offering services and utilities, a change deeply rooted in the pivot to reader revenue. This new breed of apps drives higher levels of engagement to attract and retain subscribers. Some of these new-look apps add features or membership tiers to publishers’ primary apps, while others are new standalone apps for lucrative niche sub-brands. For instance:

Mediahuis Noord has created an app highlighting its signature stories, which has increased weekly active users by 36%.
Nine in Australia has launched an app for its 45-year-old Good Food Guide brand, with unique functionality that leverages the title’s more than 900 restaurant reviews. More than 20% of the brand’s pageviews are now from the app.
Hearst UK partnered with us to create member-only workouts and training plans in their app.

The results show how publishers have combined differentiated, high-quality content with app experiences that engage audiences to drive their subscription results.

This week, we held a webinar with Airship and Leah Becerra, a senior digital editor at the Boston Globe, about app messaging best practices, including how to drive the performance of push notifications, in-app messages and Apple’s Live Activities. We’ll be sharing the recording of the webinar with members of our Mobile Matters community. If you’d like to join, you can sign up here.

Distinctive content in a unique app experience

By Kevin Anderson

Technology, radical changes in media markets and audience expectations are causing media companies to shift their focus to where they can add value.

As publishers from newspaper groups to consumer magazines focus on growing their paying subscriber base, data shows that engagement leading to regular habits is crucial to attracting new subscribers and retaining existing ones. The key to building these habits is distinctive content and superior user experience, according to the research from Northwestern University in the US.

Content that stands out is core to the app strategy of Mediahuis Noord, a group of three daily newspapers, eight bi-weekly paid newspapers and 33 free weeklies in the Netherlands.

“Despite the abundance of news, the challenge remains: Much of it is freely available on social media and local broadcasts, making traditional news less distinctive,” Ard Boer, senior product owner for Mediahuis Noord, wrote for INMA.

“Our approach shifts focus from mere news delivery to providing context and relevance, explaining why events happen and what they mean for our readers,” Ard said.

To deliver this, editors across Mediahuis Noord prioritise “Eight of the Day” – topics the editorial teams will focus on for special in-depth coverage and analysis.

“Our mantra, ‘Less is more,’ aims to make these stories stand out and avoid getting lost in the regular news flow,” he wrote.

The in-depth coverage is presented in a full-screen, swipeable format familiar to mobile audiences, and “Eight of the Day” stories incorporate full-screen images and video.

Our data shows the core content and functionality that modern apps deliver – push notifications, puzzles, audio and editions – all create deep, regular engagement with audiences that is much higher than websites. Mediahuis Noord’s app delivers these features, including a native audio player, digital editions, puzzles, moderated commenting and content local news sections that can be customised by location.

In addition to the 36% increase in weekly active users, the new app has also increased the average session time per user. In line with what publishers have told us about their priorities, Mediahuis Noord plans to increase personalisation options in their app to build on this success.

Adapting an existing brand for a premium app experience

Another new development is that publishers are creating apps specifically for valuable sub-brands.

For instance, in Australia, Nine’s Good Food Guide is a 45-year-old brand offering restaurant reviews and recipes. When it launched, the publisher recognised that audiences wanted more than just news from the group’s two flagship titles, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Good Food had offered many of its reviews and more than 10,000 recipes, but the full restaurant guide had never been digitised, Mex Cooper, the head of audience for several of Nine’s newspaper titles, wrote for INMA.

The group also saw an opportunity to expand its loyal readership to reach younger foodies. “About 75% of Australians aged 18 and older actively search, read, watch, or listen to recipes and reviews on a monthly basis,” Mex said.

With that in mind, they focused on creating an app that would be a key element of their subscription bundling strategy. Much like the New York Times with its Cooking food product, Good Food is sold as a standalone subscription, but it is also bundled with a premium digital subscription.

Regular digital subscribers could access Good Food content on the web, but exclusive app features are only available to premium digital subscribers, including:

An interactive version of the Good Food Guide, with 900 reviews. These can be filtered by price, cuisine, dietary requirements and location.
A dynamic map that can help users discover restaurants, cafes and bars nearby.
A saved list of favourite restaurants.

The app is driving significant subscriber engagement, with pageviews up 70% year-on-year, and they have also seen a “noticeable upsell to premium packages,” Mex said.

Hearst: From content to utility

Hearst UK has been rolling out new apps as part of its “enhanced membership offerings”, David Robinson, Chief Customer Officer, told us. Audiences told them during research that they were looking for more from their magazines, so when they relaunched their apps with us, they added premium membership tiers: Women’s Health Collective and Men’s Health Squad. These premium tiers include in-app training plans and workouts.

“The new apps and enhanced membership offerings will allow us to create even stronger and deeper relationships with existing and new members, whilst building more opportunities for the future with premium content that people want to pay for,” David Robinson, Chief Customer Officer at Hearst UK, said.

Conversion from trial has increased by roughly 16% over the last 12 months, he said. The publisher has plans to launch additional apps based on this enhanced membership utility model.

The common thread in these three examples is the role this new breed of apps plays in subscription strategies. It shows how apps are moving to become more central in publishers’ strategies as they offer distinctive content, superior user experience and unique app-only functionality. The results are higher levels of engagement that help convert audiences into paying subscribers and members and deeper relationships that retain these paying customers to increase lifetime value.

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