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Glitch Caused Apple to Underestimate Apple News Traffic

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Publishers who have been offering their content on Apple News have been receiving incorrect usage statistics from Apple due to an internal glitch that caused the company to miscalculate the number of people using the service, Eddy Cue told The Wall Street Journal in a statement this evening.

According to Cue, Apple has been underestimating the number of readers using the News app since it launched alongside iOS 9 in September. The problem went under the radar because Apple was busy working on improving other aspects of the service. Apple doesn't know how exactly many people are using the News app, but the company is working to fix the problem.
"We're in the process of fixing that now, but our numbers are lower than reality," [Cue] said. "We don't know what the right number is," but he added that it was better to undercount than overcount traffic.
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In October, during Apple's fourth quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple News had approximately 40 million users, but he did not specify whether that number represented people who use the Apple News app on a regular basis or if it was a number reflecting the number of people who accessed the app at one point or another. Cue echoed that number in his comments to The Wall Street Journal, but it is not clear if that is an accurate figure given Apple's current inability to calculate exact usage.

Despite not knowing how many people are using Apple News at the current time, Cue says that Apple News usage has "scaled very fast," and that the company is happy with the Apple News product's progress thus far. After launching in the United States in September, Apple News expanded to the U.K. and Australia in October with the launch of iOS 9.1.

As The Wall Street Journal points out, accurate readership numbers are important to publishers because the figures impact advertising. Publishers who share content on Apple News are able to keep 100 percent of proceeds from ads sold on their own, or 70 percent from ads sold through the Apple iAd service. According to Cue, iAd has been popular enough with publishers that Apple will be expanding the platform with a self-service ad-buying feature in the next two months.

Apple has partnered more than a hundred publications for Apple News, including The New York Times, CNN, ESPN, The Atlantic, The Daily Mail, Slate, and more. MacRumors is also on Apple News and can be subscribed to by clicking this link on an iOS device.

Article Link: Glitch Caused Apple to Underestimate Apple News Traffic
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/11/apple-news-traffic-glitch/
  • Like
Reactions: appledefenceforce
Eek, it feels horrible when you're making an automated process that's keeping stuff in a database and realize that it's leaving some information out that you can never retrieve. I imagine an Apple engineer somewhere pulling out his hair.
 
  • Like
Reactions: angsamangmukha
I should use it more. when I was, I enjoyed the layout and the content. I forget it exists.....

There...i put it in my launch bar. Let's see how long it stays there before I feel guilty that I never click on it.
 
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Reactions: Lazy and Equitek
The problem is that Apple News isn't available widely. I'd LOVE to use it, but unfortunately it cannot be used in the Netherlands. Unless you change the region to the U.S. or so, but that's a stupid workaround to be honest. I want to be able to use the app the normal way. Would be a proud user of it. Heck, I think people underestimate Apple News. I've been using it a few times and find it better than Flipboard for example. Mainly because of its interface. Flipboard is a little too flashy IMO.

Really hope Apple will make their News app available in the Netherlands as soon as possible. But that seems unlikely to happen. :p
 
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Reactions: Equitek and orbital~debris
FightTheFuture said:
Yes, Apple seems to be the only computer company that has ever released software with bugs.
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Apple is not just a "computer company"... or at least it used not to. Apple used to look for excellence from minute 0. That is what I personally admired from Apple, what brought me to Apple and what I miss.
 
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Reactions: Benjamin Frost
I think the look and feel is great but it's no replacement for RSS where you get every article, not just selections based on an algorithm. For that I use Reeder.
 
matthewhuk said:
That icon is so bad!
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I know this isn't the point of the article, but I must chime in to agree with your post. I don't like how the News app (as well as the new Wallet app) are pretty disconnected from Jony's overall iOS design language. I really hope they change these in iOS 10.
 
I don't like the way the news app gets "stuck in the past". If you come back to it after a couple of days, it will still show you the stories you were reading back then. You then have to scroll, to gradually load all the articles in-between, until you finally get to the actual "news".

I'd much prefer if the latest stories loaded first, and you scrolled down to see older stories.
 
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Reactions: Lazy, appledefenceforce and NickD73
Max(IT) said:
News still not available in Italy (and in most of the european nations). Is it so difficult to implements ?
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I thought it was in Europe as we had it for a while in the UK, that is kinda weak .
 
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