Why the Baltimore Banner Relies on Its App for Retention Tool

By: Esther Kezia Thorpe

For many publishers, apps have historically been expensive to set up, and difficult to prove ROI on. The app boom of the early 2010s, where PDF replicas or enhanced digital versions of magazines were all the rage, bore little fruit, leaving some organizations reluctant to experiment again.

Fast-forward a decade, and the landscape looks quite different. There are numerous tech providers offering more budget-friendly apps, and with the need for websites to be mobile-first, bringing content into an app is usually a much more streamlined process.

As pressures grow on traffic from social and search, some organizations are looking to apps once again, but this time for a very different purpose: retention.

Nonprofit digital news startup The Baltimore Banner launched in the summer of 2022. An app was not far behind, with the first version going live in October of that year. The app predates Eric Ulken, Vice President of Product Management, who joined the company the following spring. He was surprised that a fledgling organization like the Banner would invest in a full-featured native app, knowing how peripheral apps have been to a lot of publishers’ digital strategies.

“The answer I got was, we’re going for a premium audience,” Ulken explained. “We’re trying to build a suite of products, an offering that people will feel is worth twenty bucks a month or more. 

When you think about what we’re asking people to do, what are people expecting of us for that amount? Netflix has an app, and they cost less than we do. Every subscription product that you buy online today has an app. It’s not even a question of, should we have an app? The only question really is, how good can we make it?

A simple, but effective product

The Baltimore Banner’s app is centered around a ‘Latest News’ section, which is curated by the editorial team. Readers can also browse by topics like politics or sports, or alternatively by places the outlet covers, from Baltimore City to Howard County. 

Like the Baltimore Banner’s website, readers can access a few articles for free. But once they hit the paywall, they can be taken to the Banner’s own subscription page thanks to a change Apple has made recently to reader apps called External Link Entitlement. This keeps all subscriber data within the Banner’s own ecosystem, and saves the 30% cut Apple usually takes from subscription products in apps.

The app itself was launched in just eight weeks. It was designed by Pugpig, and integrates with Washington Post’s ARC XP CMS, the Banner’s subscription platform Piano,  and notification platform OneSignal.

Now that the app is under Ulken’s purview, he has other features he’d like to introduce. Having spent a great deal of time on a website and article redesign, he is now looking at how he can make the app a more premium experience. “Where the website and app diverge is in terms of discovery of content, and how people expect to be able to customize and personalize how information reaches them,” he explained. “In an app context, it feels more personal, and feels more bespoke than what you might see on a [website] homepage. So the expectation is that my app home screen is not necessarily the same as your home screen. It should reflect what notifications I’ve opted into and things that I’m interested in or following.”

Segmented notifications are on the product roadmap for this quarter. The Baltimore Banner’s audience team has been spending a lot of time looking at push notifications and email alert data, trying to understand what’s the right frequency and cadence. “What they’ve learned is that there seems to be a relatively high tolerance for relevant push notifications. The problem is, ‘relevant’ is a hard nut to crack,” Ulken outlined, hoping that this will tempt more subscribers to download and use the app. 

“All that is in service of the subscriber value proposition. Ultimately, if we can get a subscriber to download and use the app, we feel like we can serve them much more effectively there than we can on the web. The relationship is closer.”

Apps as a key retention tool

Of the Banner’s 44,000 paying subscribers, Ulken said that around half have downloaded the app. Although that’s an impressive figure, it’s a number they are actively trying to grow. “There is a distinct correlation between app usage and retention,” he noted. “The app users retain at a significantly higher rate than people and subscribers who have not signed into the app.”

The app’s growth has been organic; slow and steady. The publisher gets more traffic through social channels and Google Discover, but have found that the app audience are a more useful source of data. “Our app users are highly regular in their usage,” Ulken explained. “In some ways, they represent more accurately the true subscriber base, and what those interests are.”

He thinks of the app as the equivalent of the tortoise, rather than the hare. “It’s not glamorous, but it’s doing a really, really important job for us.”

The response to the app and the user behavior on it has actually made the senior leadership at the Banner change their view of where the app fits in their strategy. “The consensus recently has been, this is where our most loyal users gravitate. So this is really a way we can super-serve subscribers,” Ulken said.

Although Apple’s subscription backdoor means the app may well have some value as a conversion tool as well, Ulken acknowledged that it is much more likely that a user would subscribe to the Banner, then download the app, rather than the other way around. Being clear about this from the start helps set expectations and targets, rather than hoping an app will drive subscriber growth in itself.

For fellow media operators who are more skeptical about the ROI of apps, Ulken is confident that it pays off in the long term. “Retention is a lagging indicator. It’s really hard to measure well, and to understand the factors that drive retention,” he said. “But I can share from our experience that there’s a correlation between app usage and retention.”

“I’m confident, having talked to other folks in the field, that we’re not the only ones seeing that. The one-on-one relationship that we can develop with a user on the app is just so much tighter than what we can easily do with the web and email, that when we’re talking about a premium product with a relatively high price point, [an app] is becoming essential.”

A flagship experience

Now, Ulken’s main focus is making the app the flagship experience for the Baltimore Banner. As well as segmented push notifications, he wants it to be a destination for all Banner content, including email newsletters.

He is also about to try offering the ability to listen to articles within the app. “The jury’s out on how many people are going to use that functionality,” Ulken speculated. “But I think offering it as a subscriber benefit, you can consume our content not just through reading a screen, but listening as well, we’re interested in testing that out and understanding how much that correlates with retention.”

Subscriber-only audio is a feature a number of European publishers have seen success with. Norwegian media group Schibsted rolled out AI audio articles on Aftenposten, modeled on one of their podcast hosts, which have a 58% completion rate. Dutch publisher De Correspondent launched a dedicated audio article app with stories read by journalists after frequent member requests.

The Economist has offered subscribers a narrated audio edition of each issue since 2007, and sees it as a crucial part of their retention strategy. “We are a premium-priced publication and people feel guilty if they don’t read many stories,” Economist deputy editor Tom Standage told NiemanReports. “Our evidence suggests that the audio edition is a very effective retention tool; once you come to rely on it, you won’t unsubscribe.”

For an outlet like the Baltimore Banner, where subscriptions are forecast to make up almost half the outlet’s total revenue this year, retention is paramount. “There’s a level of intimacy in being on people’s home screens, and the opportunity to build that habit on a device that you use many, many, many times a day,” Ulken said. As other platforms prove a less and less reliable place to build and grow an audience, publisher-owned apps may well be beginning their second act.