Guardian moves into more subscription content with cooking app
The Guardian is expanding its cooking vertical.
Feast, the news brand’s cooking and recipe app first announced in April, fully launched this week on iOS and Android.
But unlike other Guardian content, the app will require a subscription to access, costing £2.99 per month (or €2.99 in the EU, $3.99 in the US and Australia, and $2.99 in Canada).
Existing Guardian supporters and recurring contributors will be offered a three-month free trial when they sign up. New subscribers to The Guardian will be given a 14-day free trial.
Recipes will still regularly appear on The Guardian‘s website, but the publisher is offering “a more premium user experience” via the app, with new and bespoke features.
These include an enhanced recipe search experience, allowing users to find recipes by ingredient, cuisine, meal type or chef, as well as the ability to save recipes and build a “digital cookbook”.
Feast also provides a “cook mode”, which provides recipe instructions while preventing phones and tablets from locking, thereby “removing the pain of wet and floury fingers on your phone or tablet”, according to Guardian Media Group chief supporter officer Liz Wynn.
The Feast sub-brand has a long history, with over 100 years of recipes provided to Guardian readers. The weekly 24-page Feast magazine is offered to Guardian readers in the print edition each Saturday and a selection of each week’s best recipes also appears in The Observer on Sundays and in Observer Food Monthly.
Katharine Viner, Guardian News and Media’s editor-in-chief, called the Feast app “a hit” based on “enthusiastic” feedback the publisher has received thus far.
“Our food editors have worked with our brilliant and innovative cooks to provide fantastic cooking ideas and an accessible, easy-to-use app,” she said.
Analysis: Following the NYT model?
The app was described by a Guardian spokesperson as the “next step” in the outlet’s growth strategy, which involves creating new products that “meet the needs of its readers and supporters around the world”.
Such a strategy mirrors that of The New York Times, whose own cooking vertical, NYT Cooking, can be subscribed to as a standalone product or purchased as part of NYT‘s larger subscription bundle, which also includes news, games, product-review site Wirecutter and sports coverage through The Athletic.
For The Guardian, pursuing such a model comes with a unique challenge. Charging for access to the Feast app, even though the food content is freely accessible online, could be a tough sell to consumers who are used to accessing The Guardian‘s suite of content for free.
The Guardian remains free to access via its website, but the publisher has been cautiously exploring ways to nudge users into paying for subscriptions.
For example, the Guardian app requires users to register to view content, while readers are only able to access a limited number of articles per month before being asked to pay to continue reading.
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With ad revenue down 16% last year, Guardian News and Media forecast a £39m deficit in the 2023/24 fiscal year — and this could be spurring the need to consider alternative revenue drivers.
NYT‘s model of bundling has been widely viewed as successful in providing consumers consistent reasons to interact with the brand on a daily basis. At the World News Media Congress in Copenhagen in May, former Washington Post editor Martin Baron admitted that “The New York Times did a better job of reconstituting the bundle” than the Post, which did not do so “adequately”.
“They have demonstrated their value and they’re seeing the benefits of that,” said Baron. “And what all news organisations need to do, from the biggest to the smallest at the local level, is demonstrate that you’re providing absolutely essential reading; or if you’re a broadcast outlet, same thing — something that people really value.”
Sir Mark Thompson, who oversaw NYT‘s digital transformation, is now looking to provide similar value for CNN. Earlier this week, the CNN CEO called it a “logical possibility” that the US broadcaster would pursue a subscription bundle akin to NYT after he announced a new digital subscription offering focused on “news you can use”.