Apple News+ Revenue
Apple News+ seems to be floundering just months after its launch, according to new details from participating magazine publishers shared by Business Insider.
Multiple publishers have been unimpressed with the revenue generated from Apple News+. One told Business Insider that revenue was one twentieth of what Apple promised, while another said that it was on par with what was earned from Texture, which isn’t much.
This implies Apple News publishers are making half of what they did with Texture, which is impressively bad. (10x/20 = .5x)
Apple made a big deal about WSJ, for example, being part of News+, but if I understand correctly the index of articles is not included, so you can’t browse the content listing. You’re left with inbound links and whatever they push into the News+ feed.
Gotta pony up for the feed.
Last month, Eddy Cue said that Apple had “hundreds” of people working to make Apple News+ better. Apple News+ is currently available in the United States and Canada, but it’s expected to launch in the UK this year as well.
You know what what would make Apple News better? This…
• Let me delete my downloaded mags.
• Show new issues in sidebar list of my subscribed mags.
• Give the Mac version support for multiple windows or tabs—no more of this one-window iOS bullcrap.
Jumping to the topic of Apple News+, Cue stated that one of Apple’s big goals right now is to convince younger people to subscribe to the service.
Previously:
Update (2019-07-15): Josh Centers:
The best bet for Apple News+ isn’t legacy publishers, but small, platform-oriented ones like @GlennF and @jdalrymple. Too bad Apple already burned people like that with Newsstand.
These big dinosaurs have a hard time adapting to these new formats. Smaller outlets can and will do it if given the proper support. Look at what @MacSparky does with Apple Books.
“Hey, read a month-old Macworld article for just $10 a month” isn’t a great sales pitch.
Update (2019-08-07): Lucinda Southern (via Eric Young):
Publishers including Vice Media and The Stylist Group say they’ve gotten traffic and, more importantly, revenue lifts from Apple News in the last three months. While this is from a small base, for some publishers it signifies that patience with publishing to the platform, which has been widely accepted as good for brand awareness but lagging revenue, is starting to pay off.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
Apple News+ was always going to be a hard sell The reason publishing is dying is so much stuff is available for free on the web. News+ collates a lots of stuff but it's still up against even more stuff for nothing.
I like the service, hate the app. In addition to what has previously been mentioned, News needs a way to bookmark News+ articles (including the ones inside magazines) for reading later. If I can save regular News articles, why can't I save the "plus" articles? WTF. It also needs a way to delete certain topics from everywhere in the app. Why can't I block "Sports" stories and articles? No matter how much I "Dislike" sports-related news, it still keeps showing me sports crap. It doesn't seem to learn very well, e.g. customizing my feed, based on what I Like and Dislike.
The whole entire experience is a conglomeration of What Not To Do when making an app. I really can't believe there are hundreds of people working on it. It's so terrible beyond belief, it's like they don't actually want you to find content and read it. Even Google News is better than Apple News (on iPhone) which says a lot because Google's iPhone apps are always kinda shitty and weird.
Living in Japan there are many Apple services that take a long time to arrive (if ever, hello HomePod?) which can be frustrating at times. Apple News, not so much.
Apple Music, Apple News+, and likely Apple TV+, they are all launched as half baked half hearted services. And it shows they simply don't get it. They may be good with making great products, but services just doesn't seems to be in their DNA. Music only got to where it is now by copying Spotify.
