The New York Times Unveils Its Stand-Alone Audio App

The New York Times released its highly anticipated audio app on Wednesday, an ambitious product whose fate could influence the future of audio journalism and whose launch represents the first stand-alone app the publisher has debuted since the Cooking app nine years ago.

The new platform, called New York Times Audio, will be available exclusively to All Access and News subscribers on iOS, an audience of roughly 9.5 million listeners. At the end of last year, The Times averaged 129 million downloads per month across its audio portfolio, according to the publisher.

“The Times is best when it becomes a part of your life and offers the authority of the institution to help guide you to the information you need,” said deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick. “With Audio, we wanted to see how we could offer that guidance—the serendipity, the big story, the surprise and delight—all with your phone in your pocket.” 

The introduction of a proprietary app to house its audio journalism represents a bold evolution of The Times’ broader strategy to cultivate direct relationships with its audience, according to Esther Kezia Thorpe, a media analyst and co-host of the Media Voices podcast. 

Its launch makes The Times one of only a handful of news organizations—alongside NPR and two Dutch publishers, De Correspondent and NRC—that have sought to alter the consumption patterns of their listenership by prompting them to patronize an individual app.

The Times is aware of the difficulty in shifting user behavior, according to Stephanie Preiss, the senior vice president of television and audio at The Times. But nearly 18 months of beta testing helped convince the publisher that ardent listeners would make the migration. 

Whether such behavior translates from the sample group to the broader population remains an open question, according to audio analyst Bryan Barletta, the founder of Sounds Profitable.

“This gets at a core question in audio: Should we treat podcasting like streaming, where each source has its own app, or like a browser, where people prefer a specific portal?” Barletta said. “Spotify just unwalled a bunch of its exclusive Gimlet podcasts in April, which would suggest the latter.”

Exclusive audio products hope to lure in listeners

The app will house all of the audio products currently available from The Times, including popular podcasts like The Daily, The Ezra Klein Show and Modern Love. 

It will also showcase a host of new offerings exclusive to the app, such as The Headlines and Shorts, which offer brief bites of highly produced audio designed for quick, daily consumption.

In addition to Times journalism, the app will feature podcasts from select publishers, including Rolling Stone and New York Magazine, as well as series from owned and affiliated titles, such as This American Life, Serial and The Athletic.

The launch of New York Times Audio will also mark the sunsetting of the Audm app, although a new section, called The Magazine Stand, will feature narrated versions of the kind of long-form journalism previously found on Audm.

The curated design of the app could help reduce the choice overanalysis often induced by audio platforms, according to Thorpe, lowering the barrier to entry for new audiences and reducing the challenge of discovery that has long plagued the medium. The abundance of daily content, too, could help build valuable habit among listeners.

Subscriber retention now, advertising enhancement later

While the introduction of New York Times Audio could unlock valuable advertising capabilities in the future, the publisher views the app primarily as a tool for subscriber retention, according to Preiss.

By providing fans of The Times’ audio journalism a dedicated space to explore the medium further, the publisher hopes to encourage deeper engagement with its offerings and add increased value to a digital subscription. 

“One of the most important focuses of our business is reengaging subscribers with multiple products on a regular basis,” Preiss said. “We think New York Times Audio is offering something not available anywhere else: the daily guidance of what to listen to today.”

However, the app will enable The Times to collect rich first-party data on its listenership, which will inform its editorial and commercial strategy. 

It will also allow the publisher to serve in-app audio ads, which can fetch higher ad revenues because they are served at the moment of the ad break rather than inserted when the podcast is downloaded, according to Barletta. 

Still, The Times still plans on generating the bulk of its audio ad revenue via off-platform services, like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, where the majority of its audience currently finds its podcasts, according to Preiss.

“This marks a new chapter in our audio strategy that is consistent with the way The Times thinks about the business broadly,” Preiss said. “And that is: We are in the ads business, and we are in the subscription business.”