Apple News+ Struggling to Get New Subscribers

[TrueBlou]

I think that's part of the problem but because of the internet, reading a magazine or the WSJ online is old news. With the internet you can literally get free up to the second breaking news on your phone or computer.

Apple's News+ isn't the problem but the medium/delivery is. It's right up there with advertising in a phonebook vs advertising online. The phonebook died many years ago because finding a business online was easier and cost less money to advertise. Now seniors are also using Google to do searches.

That’s pretty much my point. News isn’t a draw to attract people, there are plenty of free, reliable sources to obtain constantly up to date news articles.

Magazines on the other hand are an entirely different story. Sure, one can find lots of articles online for every subject under the sun - I know, I write for a couple of websites.

But, there are still many excellent monthly publications which provide interesting and thought provoking reading which simply isn’t available for free on the internet.

One may find alternative articles from different sources, but its far from the same. The multi-billion dollar magazine subscription services such as Readly, Magzter and to a lesser degree (at the moment) Apple News+, clearly show there remains a substantial desire for these forms of publications. And it’s not just the oldies, I know many people from ages 8 to 76 who read the magazines religiously every single month.

So, I still think, at the moment it’s not so much the content of AN+, though it could certainly do with more if it is to compete, it’s an image problem. In my humble opinion they are marketing it in entirely the wrong way.
It has created a general public opinion, certainly on here and other places, of a pointless source of news which can be better found elsewhere for free. Which is true, but the focus should not be on the news, it should be on the content which is not available elsewhere for free. Essentially they are marketing it in reverse.
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It’s posters like you who make these forums worth reading! Thanks again!!! I signed back up and was able to get everything working the way you described. You’d think they’d have more subscribers. To me there’s enough content there to make it worth while. For a little more than a subscription to one or two monthly magazines you get a lot more content. The experience of reading magazines on the iPhone X isn’t great but it’s perfect on my iPad. Thanks again!!!!

That’s great, I’m so glad you got it working to your satisfaction and that you’re happy with it.

Apple can be an odd company when it comes to making features known these days. If you’re ever unsure of something, need some help, or just want a bit of advice. Feel free to drop me a PM, I regularly help people out in private with all sorts of things.

 

[ericwn]

If you sell bad hardware, people also buy no services from you. If you torture your customers with more and more restrictions, remove OpenGL, ignore Vulkan, scrap customers 32 Bit applications, customers don‘t buy services from you.
If the OS releases are buggy every year, people buy no services from you.

Hope Apple will‘ll crash and burn following this strategy.

You are digging far in order to find reasons for a low adoption rate. I would guess that first of all you need a compelling offering.
When you come across some many magazines that are not giving you more than a PDF based viewer without even the chance of letting you adjust the reading settings for font, size etc I think that’s telling. There shouldn’t be even one of these offerings that doesn’t benefit from being consumed on a modern day device.

 

[ericwn]

I don't think anyone in my household would give Apple TV Plus even a momentary glance. But as soon as Disney+ was available my wife was like shut up and take my money! I'll admit some of the shows on Apple TV Plus look interesting but not enough to join. Including Disney+ we have several paid for TV services and don't have the budget or time for more - Apple is too late to this game and does not have the impressive library like Disney+ to entice folks like us.

So far we are loving Disney+. Can't wait to watch the Mandalorian as well.

Interesting, but I wouldn’t have thought that news is meant to detract you from TV watching. Both have their place but if your family currently doesn’t have a strong magazine reading habit I doubt a subscription service will change that.

 

[TrueBlou]

You are digging far in order to find reasons for a low adoption rate. I would guess that first of all you need a compelling offering.
When you come across some many magazines that are not giving you more than a PDF based viewer without even the chance of letting you adjust the reading settings for font, size etc I think that’s telling. There shouldn’t be even one of these offerings that doesn’t benefit from being consumed on a modern day device.

The PDF issue can be a problem on smaller devices. For iPhone especially I think they all need to offer a tailored product experience.
It’s no big deal on my iPad 12.9, the PDF’s look perfectly fine because it’s about the size of a magazine page anyway.

My wife also prefers the PDFs because she likes the layouts of the magazines she reads. She doesn’t seem to have a problem on her 10.5” iPad, but I think even at that size it might bother me.

 

[JWD]

Well I'm done with my 3 month free trial and will not be renewing. I loved being able to access a ton of content, but nothing I read was truly life changing, felt mostly like a waste of my time. I also do not follow celebrities lives, but like reading about technology, cycling, parenting tips and local/national Canadian news (tired of reading and hearing about Trump). I think this subscription targets people who like to follow celebrities, or people who spend a lot of time idle at airports or at the cottage. For me, there were too many ads that took up the entire screen. I did notice a few publishers adding really neat scrolling graphic designs that added to my overall experience. I could not believe there is NO SEARCH function; talk about a HUGE missed opportunity! I found myself often wanting to simply search what I was looking for but that was not possible.

 

[BarrettF77]

Agreed. They will need to bundle this at a steeply discounted price. I’ve gotten to where I just don’t even read the headlines if it has a plus by it and the articles were usually old anyways.

 

[furbzv1]

i forgot to cancel the subscription so ill have it for another month.
rarely used it.

 

[Beyo]

Well I'm done with my 3 month free trial and will not be renewing.

At least you could do a trial. I am in Poland and Tim Cook not even giving us Trailers and it’s 2020:/

 

[Steve121178]

It was dead on arrival. Apple should pull the plug and forget it ever happened.

 

[BigMcGuire]

It’s nice getting wsj and la times articles. But like others stated, it still hasn’t figured out what I like to read and it is way too political focused even after months of me saying I don’t like it. Still for $9 and the content, it isn’t horrible. I just expected a lot more.

 

[Zimmy68]

Yep, my 3 month trial was up and cancelling it was a no brainer.
I basically used it to browse digital magazines that I would never have interest in subscribing to in the first place.
It desperately needed newspapers and paywall websites (The Atlantic, The Athletic, etc). I wanted something more than the LA Times (I'm on the East Coast).
The most I would consider for the service in its current state is $3 a month.
The fact that you can't use it on a PC was another deal breaker.

 

[DevNull0]

It was dead on arrival. Apple should pull the plug and forget it ever happened.

You're right and I think Apple is going to quietly let it whither away and then make it disappear. Apple simply doesn't understand what magazines are and the link between a magazine service and News was idiotic from day 1.

As someone who use to like the Next Issue / Texture service, I find it very sad.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

I found the whole idea as dead on arrival. Newspapers and Magazines is a dying business just like the telephone book. Magazines and Newspapers are yesterday's and last weeks news. I prefer up to the minute news and all that is possible with the internet and smartphones.

 

[DevNull0]

I found the whole idea as dead on arrival. Newspapers and Magazines is a dying business just like the telephone book. Magazines and Newspapers are yesterday's and last weeks news. I prefer up to the minute news and all that is possible with the internet and smartphones.

This is exactly how Apple screwed up so badly.

If you look at the list of magazines on News+, 90%+ have nothing to do with News. In fact, there are only 16 magazines in the "News and Politics" category. There are hundreds of magazines appealing to hobbies and special interests that are not out of date the day after they're printed.

Sure you can google any topic and find ramblings of 150 boring semi-literate people for ever decent thing you find, or you can read a magazine on the topic and find properly edited and curated articles by people with actual journalism skills. Just scanning the list of Apple News+ magazines, how quickly does a fashion or travel magazine go out of date? There's no free website substitute for Maxim/GQ or National Geographic. Not to mention the 100+ sports and hobby titles. Even food magazines; try and find a decent recipe online and when you're done pulling out your hair, buy a food magazine.

The point is that you're right, news is out of date before it's printed in a magazine and nobody is interested in magazines for news. But there's hundreds of really good magazines on News+ that nobody even knows are their because it's called News+ and magazines have nothing to do with news and haven't for many years.

Tl;dr. This is 100% an Apple screwup. They bought a good product (Texture) and utterly destroyed it because nobody at Apple even knows what a magazine is for. Even worse because that absolutely destroyed a good magazine service by trying to build it into a news reader.

 

[Beyo]

At least there is one less service for Android users. That alone makes me happy

 

[Muzzakus]

Most annoying thing about Apple+ is they infuse it in the app so your constantly tripping over it with no sub. It’s fing anti consumer. I don’t want it, hide it you wankers!

 

[ericwn]

At least there is one less service for Android users. That alone makes me happy

Paid services that only exist on one platform make you happy?

 

[charlituna]

This is exactly how Apple screwed up so badly.

If you look at the list of magazines on News+, 90%+ have nothing to do with News. In fact, there are only 16 magazines in the "News and Politics" category. There are hundreds of magazines appealing to hobbies and special interests that are not out of date the day after they're printed.

that is actually something that could have been good but like a number of apple projects it seems they haven't really done anything with it. i haven't added a new magazine in ages, there are lots of topics i'd follow in the app but either the system for some weird reason won't allow it or the results are useless cause you can't refine the topic.

it's iTunes U all over again. Ping all over again. iWeb etc etc

heck there's so much they could do with the iTunes store, TV app, Books but they seem to be utterly clueless