Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple News+ Offering Three-Month Free Trial in U.S. and Canada This Weekend Only
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
This’s true. People who loves reading magazines is a dying breed I guess. I’m one though. 😀 I don’t subscribe because on my trial I found it’s really hard to get back to my favorite magazines. The app just isn’t enjoyable to browse. News is OK because it’s free. If News+ is free I would tolerate it but it’s not so I don’t continue.
Makes the app easy and enjoyable to read magazines and I’ll come back.
I personally love Apple News+. I saved a load of money by canceling my many hard copy / digital magazine subscriptions e.g. Forbes, MacLife, Macworld, Nat Geo, SI, Golf Tips, etc. I would assume most older folks like me (retiring 12/31) would be the magazine lovers more apt to like News+.
Yes, it's a little clunky, sometimes slow to synch between iPhone, iPad, and iMac, and still has quite a few that have not embraced the News+ format, but still a great app in my opinion.
Besides saving me money, now have a lot less clutter w/o all the paper mags showing up every month.
Yes, it's a little clunky, sometimes slow to synch between iPhone, iPad, and iMac, and still has quite a few that have not embraced the News+ format, but still a great app in my opinion.
Besides saving me money, now have a lot less clutter w/o all the paper mags showing up every month.
They can give 3 years free trial, still barely anyone would want to use it.
[automerge]1575190937[/automerge]
It won't.
[automerge]1575190937[/automerge]
It won't.
Totally irrelevant and baseless claim.
People do check email. Maybe not every single day, but they check it.
People keep Apple services after the trial because they want to, not because they forgot about it.
The only reason Apple is giving trials is to let customers try the service and eventually decide they like it. Not to scam customers.
If that was the case they wouldn't need a credit card on file. Since, like you said, people check their email. Apple could email them at the end and say if you'd like to continue we need your credit card, right?
No one is doing that way.
You try a service if you are interested in it, so it is handy to have everything set up to start paying for it at the end of the trial.
But Apple will let you know when the trial period is going to end.
I completely agree… If they reverted back to NEWSTAND it would make more sense… But with their "Plus/+" branding they are creating a new tier of produce/service like they are doing with their products with "Pro" This is NOT News - it is glossy advertising glued together with fluff. I am not buying in.
Their current "Cover Story" ? An advertisement sponsored by Oprah.
Attachments
You can say that it's ridiculous but it is neither irrelevant nor baseless - nor is it a scam.
In the olden days of book and record clubs a key metric was "average take" - the average number of items a customer would purchase at full price after the trial period, or in the case of a record club after the minimum commitment was satisfied. You'd measure that for different marketing strategies to see where to spend your limited budget. The average take of a direct mail customer might be 5.1 while a magazine ad was 5.9. This along with marketing efficiency (cost of eyeball and hit rate) allows you to build P&Ls.
The other metric was average intent which is tough but not impossible to measure. If 5% of the last item sold was returned then a large majority of customers dropped the club when they intended to. If 80% were returned then you could be certain that they had held on until they said enough is enough and if they had it to do over again would have dropped a month or two ago. Many people keep and pay for the last item even though they don't want it and will never read it.
Average Take minus Average Intent is always a positive number and applies to free trials as much as book clubs or civil war chess sets (remember those? a huge average take because nobody wants 29 pieces of a chess set. Average Intent was usually 32 so the spread was also huge)
It's an element of a business model that relies on customers' irrational behavior and inefficiency. Apple News+ will profit by it and their marketing analysts know that.
Last edited:
That would be true of some industries, but I really don't think that's how Apple is operating this. The time and effort it takes to set this up and offer it to someone for free for one month or three months is just not worth whatever revenue they get from "tricking" people into continuing for a month or two. It's a crap business model that bottom feeders might do to scratch up revenue, but it wouldn't amount to anything but chump change for Apple.
I thought their 3 month offer for Apple Music was quite effective in convincing me to sign up for it after several years of dismissing it. I've been on their one month Apple Music offer too and that didn't change my listening habits enough to get me to want to get a subscription. It wasn't enough time. Habits take time to change. The three month trial was a different story. After it ended, I found I had so many albums I wanted to buy that it made sense to just keep on the subscription.
I'm still not entirely sure if I'll be on Apple Music indefinitely, but I'm about to sign up for their one year plan (that gives you two months free). I've got one year to figure out if I feel like it's in my best interests to keep shelling out subscription fees instead of buying just the music I like the best.
I suspect they're hoping that the same effect that the three month offer had for Apple Music will also apply to Apple News+. I'm not so sure that it will though. The library of Apple Music vs Apple News+ is vastly different and those of us of a certain age are quite used to starting and stopping magazine subscriptions on a whim.
Last edited:
So what if no one else is doing it that way. They are ALL doing it for one reason, Apple included.
I'm looking at price point vs. content for me personally.
For me:
For me:
- Apple Music...totally worth the $14.99 I pay for family sharing.
- Apple Arcade...for the sake of my kid...totally worth the $4.99.
- Apple TV+...when considering the lack of free time I have and the fact that I actually am enjoying the shows...I consider the $4.99 worth it. I don't have enough free time to sit and binge, so the amount of content (or lack thereof) isn't exactly an issue for me.
- Apple News+...I was never much of a magazine reader as it was anyway, so I don't really see anything (in my personal opinion) that justifies paying the same price that Arcade and TV+ would be combined. I honestly think it would be easier to justify Arcade and maybe TV+ being $9.99 and then News+ being $4.99. I would find it easier to pay $9.99 for Arcade or TV+ (only one being that price though. Both being $9.99 would be a bit much) than pay for News+ at the current price.
It's never going to be $4.99 unless apple is willing to just throw money away. The content providers get 50% of the fees, plus/minus some sort of math based on how many articles someone may have read or not. NYTIMES, WSJ, New Yorker and others are never going to live with a split of $2.50 a month, they will just continue to target DTC themselves. I think at $9.99 apple is probably STILL losing money on this. Making it cheaper is probably going to be a real challenge. I thInk their best option is a bundle, $24.99 a month for Apple Music/news/Apple TV+ and figure out losses across one or more and figure you're going to be getting FBI into the future for 100M subs.
You're right, which is a shame because I actually liked Texture and used them for years.
There are very few news magazines left and calling a magazine service a news service was a fatal mistake from day one. Magazines today are about hobbies and special interests. Maybe Timmy is still living in 1932, which would explain why he doesn't know what a computer is.
The medium? You mean reading content on a screen? What’s the newest form?
They really missed the mark with the branding... I had no idea that 'Apple News+' also included what was Texture (magazines). Not that it really matters. Apple's subs really need to be bundled. Like $4.99/month for Arcade, $9.99/month ala carte isn't going to make the monthly budget review for most. Bundle Arcade and News with the Apple Music for $19.99 - $24.99 and maybe it sticks.
The closest is the "following" tab, which sorta works but not really.
I'd not be surprised if it were on purpose because they don't want you to search up the premium content. All the "News+" stories are widely covered, but the free coverage of the same stories is impossible to find, and it's insane that they'll present a story as pay-only when every news outlet worth a Google search result will report on it for free.
Google News covers more important things, and you get multiple sources' views about each story, which is the only way to be fair. The only thing is it's slow and annoying to use vs Apple News with its clean interface. Something Google won't understand. So I still find myself on Apple News a lot, sadly.
[automerge]1575264134[/automerge]
Twitter is much more on the edge than any news source is maybe what he means. Or if he doesn't mean that, well, it's still true. I just don't have time to dig through that.
[automerge]1575264465[/automerge]
Why not present something in-app or in an email to opt in to pay at the end of the trial? Meanwhile they make me authenticate just to download *free* apps from the App Store. Opt-out payment is the oldest trick in the book.
AWS is the most notorious for bill shock, but Heroku and GCP make things much clearer, including the free trial requiring an opt-in to pay. So not everyone does it the same.
Last edited:
News+ suffers from the same problem many of the content organization apps/systems in iOS/tvOS suffer. You simply cannot find stuff.
It is the same issue I have with my movies in tvOS, once you get to a certain number, the genre sorting just does not do it anymore. Especially if everything is either action or drama, even if it is not.
It is the same issue I have with my movies in tvOS, once you get to a certain number, the genre sorting just does not do it anymore. Especially if everything is either action or drama, even if it is not.
