The Financial Times’ FT Edit App Proves a Hit Retention Tool
By: Esther Kezia Thorpe
In March 2022, the Financial Times made a surprising announcement. It was going to launch a new app, bringing eight stories a day for a significantly lower price than its main subscription packages, which start around the $39/mo mark. The app, FT Edit, is free on iOS for the first 30 days, then is priced at $0.99 for the first 6 months, and $4.99 thereafter.
Explaining the rationale for its launch, Assistant Editor Janine Gibson told DCN, “We are known for financial news, and we’re incredibly strong at our core product. But we produce a wide breadth of news that matters, and I don’t think people really know that about the FT.” It began to see that there was a much wider appetite for its journalism beyond its core business audience.
The other appeal of an app with just eight stories is its finishability; an antidote to the news overwhelm that many people face. “We’re not trying to give you a summary of everything that’s happened but something that’s very high quality to read,” Editor Malcome Moore said in a seminar just after its launch.
For a specialist publisher like the FT, creating a product that opens up their work to a wider audience at a more consumer-friendly price point is a smart move. But it is not without its challenges. From marketing and messaging, to concerns about cannibalizing existing subscriptions, the team certainly had their work cut out for them.
Two years since the launch of FT Edit, and a year on from the release of a dedicated version, FT Edit’s Editor Hannah Rock spoke to AMO about the opportunities and pitfalls of launching a cheaper app product alongside a premium subscription offering.
Reflecting on the past two years
Overall, Rock said that FT Edit has been a very positive experience for the publisher. But she did note that launching a new app is “no joke.” “It’s incredibly hard,” she said, explaining that launching only on iOS was an early error. “We’ve definitely made mistakes, and we are constantly learning and constantly evolving.”
So far, they have attracted a wide range of readers. These err towards younger people, but there’s also a skew towards the slightly older reader too; those who have retired and don’t necessarily need full FT coverage for their work any more, but who still value the FT brand and perspective.
As for early concerns about cannibalizing existing subscriptions, Rock said that these simply haven’t materialized at all. “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.”
That’s a significant conversion achievement given the high jump in price points, from $4.99 a month to potentially $50 and upwards.
The app also boasts some impressive retention statistics. 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.
Rock shared that of the 265,000 downloads the FT Edit has, around 20% of them are active paying subscribers.
The key to getting readers down that funnel is the day one, week one experience. “If we can get them to read just one article when they come into the app in the first instance, they’re so much more likely to stick with us and to subscribe,” Rock explained.
The team recently did an analysis on their retention rates, which they found encouraging. “We don’t have a retention problem, what we have is a reach problem,” Rock noted. “Even if the cancellation and retention rates remain exactly the same, we need ever-larger volumes of acquisitions to keep [growing] at a steady pace. So our focus now is actually about widening the funnel at the top.”
The value of curation
Given the wide range of stories the FT produces, choosing just eight each day is a careful balancing act. Rock has a number of rules she follows, from pieces that they won’t or can’t read elsewhere to pieces that cast light on issues or places that they wouldn’t previously have considered. She also tries to include pieces that will make readers smile or entertain them.
For big news events, they take the day two or three story; a more considered take when reporters and editors have had a chance to digest and put a deeper, more comprehensive piece together rather than staying on top of breaking news.
One curious learning was around datelines. The FT Edit app has had its datelines taken off to create a sense of timelessness. The online versions of these stories still have dates, so the team have been able to compare the responses. “Datelines come in, and suddenly people aren’t interested in a story from yesterday,” said Rock. “Whereas on the app, they are none the wiser, and they love it!”
“We also experimented on the app pulling archive pieces, but we did feel the need to label them as archived pieces. But the second you label that as an archive piece, people weren’t interested. So there is this sense of, my time is precious, I must therefore be reading the most immediate news. But if you remove that pressure, just think of all the amazing things you could do.”
Happy birthday, FT Edit US
The app has seen a boost since launching in the US in March 2023. Now, a quarter of FT Edit app downloads are from “curious American readers who know the FT brand but who haven’t really read us before.”
“We were under no illusions, the US is a very different market and a much more challenging market in many ways,” said Rock. “We purposely didn’t set ourselves any metrics at launch because we really wanted to learn as much as possible about the audience and how they were going to respond to the FT.”
The FT have since found that US readers are hungry for an international perspective on themselves, and favor news about how America fits in with the rest of the world. The team have also positioned themselves as a secondary subscription; something readers will pay for in addition to a main news source. “In a market like the US, when you’ve got the New York Times who has something like 60% of all paid news subscriptions, it doesn’t leave much space,” Rock explained.
The eight daily stories are curated differently in the US, with more of a business focus than the UK. Rock said this was because they are also trying to overcome the initial hurdles of brand awareness, recognition and expectation overseas, whereas UK audiences are very familiar with their core business coverage.
Evolving FT Edit beyond iOS
Despite the FT Edit’s initial success, the team now faces challenges as it grows. “One of our current focuses is on solving this apparent dichotomy between what readers say they value – human curation based on editorial judgment and experience – and what they say they expect, which is stories and that selection tailored to them based on their reading habits and preferences,” Rock said.
The FT are experimenting with functionality in the app which offers both, playing around with customisation and personalisation while maintaining the unique selling point of curation. These are in an initial testing phase.
The other significant development is creating an offering for those without an Apple device, as the app can currently only be downloaded on iOS. Rather than creating a whole new Android version, the team have soft- launched a web version of FT Edit to capture the inbuilt warm audience of anonymous users coming to the main ft.com website every day.
This isn’t a product that they can sell yet. FT Edit web at present offers web readers 30 days of a newsletter, where they can read eight stories linked in that for free. At the end of the month, they’re offered the iOS app download, or a trial to the main FT subscription. It’s not an ideal journey, especially given the limited market of Apple worldwide. But it’s where Rock and her team are focusing their efforts next.
“One of our key focus areas is trialing and sampling,” she explained. “It’s actually quite important; how do we integrate FT Edit into the wider FT offering? Where do we fit? What role do we play? We’re really hoping that FT Edit web will start to help us answer those questions.”
An obvious question might be why the FT wouldn’t simply implement an 8 article meter, rather than their current hard paywall – or three free stories each month for registered users. Rock said that curation is what is valuable with FT Edit, and what they want to take to the wider market. “We believe there is lots of value in our proposition of handpicked, curated, completable, everything that we launched with [the app], we still stand by it,” she emphasized.
FT Edit seems to be at an inflection point. The publisher has recognised that it needs to widen its reach beyond just an iOS app, but rather than focus its efforts on an Android version, it instead is navigating a precarious maze of web editions. It has some work to do on its messaging around this, as the page lacks clarity for the uninitiated. Creating an offering for the millions of non-paying visitors the FT gets is a smart move, but the role of apps as a key part of this journey should not be underestimated.
Update: We removed a reference to how many actual paying subscribers there were.
