The New York Times will this month begin drawing its popular podcasts behind its online subscriptions barrier.
Listeners will be able to pass through the paywall if they have a New York Times news, All Access or NYT Audio login. And for the first time it will also be possible to purchase an audio-only subscription directly through third-party hosting platforms.
New York Times head of subscription growth Ben Cotton told Press Gazette the launch hopes to find revenue in previously untapped audiences – and lure new subscribers into its All Access bundle.
“What we’ve seen is that we have millions of listeners who continue to engage with us exclusively on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or another third-party platform,” Cotton said.
“We see it as a natural evolution to extend subscription rules and offerings that we started to put in place on our own products to third-party platforms.”
The New York Times already has its own paywalled audio app, NYT Audio, which is accessible to anyone with an All Access or news subscription. A standalone subscription to NYT Audio is also available, Cotton said, but “it’s not something we’ve emphasised”.
Anyone with a standalone NYT Audio subscription can use it to pass the Spotify and Apple Podcasts paywalls, and likewise anyone who buys a sub through the third-party platforms can use those same credentials for NYT Audio. Access through either route will cost $6 a month or $50 for a year.
To some extent, Cotton said, the new paywall will be a leap in the dark.
“People who are listening on other platforms – they are not authenticated with The New York Times in any way on those platforms, and so we don’t really have any way of knowing for sure how many of them are subscribers already. We expect there’s a meaningful number who are. And that’s not the goal of this program, but one interesting thing we will learn is how many of those people are already subscribers.”
He would not go into details on how many subscribers the NYT was targeting with the new paywall, but said: “We do have ambitious goals about the growth of new subscribers we’ll get from this… We expect to start and then be able to build over time.”
What will be inside and outside the paywall?
The paywall, which does not yet have a public launch date, will not cover all NYT audio output. For always-on podcasts like flagship NYT news show The Daily or lifestyle feature Modern Love, the two or three most recent episodes will remain open to the non-paying public.
Similarly for old seasons of longform narrative podcasts like those made by Serial Productions, the first few episodes will be available outside the paywall as tasters. Each episode from new seasons, on the other hand, will be made available to subscribers earlier than non-subscribers, in an approach similar to that of audio-first newsroom Tortoise. Other enticements may include subscriber-only episodes across the portfolio.
New podcasts will not be paywalled, Cotton said, because they need “a chance to build up an audience”.
None of the above were strict rules, he added: “I’m trying to emphasise as much as I can that we expect that to be flexible – not because we’re not sure what to do, but because we naturally expect that we will learn things once we launch this and we’ll evolve.”
NYT podcast subscription priced to ‘incentivise anybody who is interested in the bundle to give it a shot’
Cotton said podcasts are “quite important” as a funnel for getting new people into the NYT ecosystem.
“In some ways it’s one of our biggest bets and best opportunities for reaching new audiences that we might not be reaching in other ways.
“To some extent, that’s part of the job of each of the products in our portfolio – not just audio, but Games or Cooking or The Athletic…
“A critical part of that is having a subscription offering that speaks just to where they are right now, and if we require somebody to pay for all of The New York Times just to get access to the podcast they’re really passionate about now, we know that some people might not do that.”
[Read more: How games are powering online subscriptions at The New York Times]
There is a caveat there, however: canny prospective NYT podcast subscribers may notice that the monthly subscription price is 50% higher than the $4 a month it costs for a promotional (i.e. temporary) New York Times “All Access” sub, which grants access not only to the audio product but news on nytimes.com, Games, Cooking, The Athletic and consumer advice service Wirecutter.
Press Gazette has reported before that the Times has been aggressively pushing its All Access bundle, which returns higher average revenue per user than a single-product subscription, through discounted offers that make it cheaper to buy the bundle than a sub to, for example, news or Games.
Asked whether the audio paywall was intended as a new route to guide people into the bundle, Cotton said that was “consistent with what we do on Games or Cooking or The Athletic or anywhere else that we sell an individual, standalone subscription offering.
“We have seen, more broadly, that the low introductory rate for All Access – that gives you a chance to come in at a low price and engage and sample across the bundle for a meaningful period of time – makes it much more likely that you will stick with us and will stick with us even when we raise your price up.
“So we do do that intentionally to try to incentivise anybody who is interested in the bundle to give it a shot. We’ve had success doing that on our other products, too, and I expect we can do that here.
“But we expect, as I was saying earlier, that some people will just be interested in continuing to listen to that podcast that they don’t have full access to anymore, or those few shows that they’re interested in, and so we we’ll give them a chance to start there and then hopefully upgrade to the full bundle over time…
“At first, the goal is just to make this program successful – that second part only comes if we get a lot of people subscribed to the audio to begin with.”
Why is the New York Times podcast paywall launching now?
The Times is introducing the paywall now partially because its audio product is mature enough, Cotton said: “We have a fair amount of experience launching other subscription businesses, and what we look for is to try to build out an offering that can find an audience and then can deeply engage an audience.
“And once we’ve built up a deeply engaged audience and feel like we have made something that we’ve proven, that is strong enough that people will be willing to pay for, we want to actually go ahead and do that.”
But he added it was also happening now because “these particular platforms have made meaningful advancements in the way that their technology for people who want to sell subscriptions works. They’re in a much better place than when we might have talked about this a year or two or three ago.”
Relatively frictionless podcast paywalls are a recent development. The Economist, an early mover in the area, launched its podcast-only subscription offering in September 2023, a little over a year after telling Press Gazette it was mulling the move. Podcast business Acast launched its technology integrating publisher paywalls with Apple Podcasts in June last year.
“We have a pretty high bar when we introduce a subscription offering anywhere for wanting that to feel like a seamless and high quality experience for our potential customers,” Cotton said. “We feel like the offerings on Apple Podcasts and Spotify meet that bar now.”
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