Apple News+ Struggling to Get New Subscribers

[DevNull0]

Reason: nobody reads magazines anymore in the magazine format.

Well clearly enough people read magazines to keep all those hundreds of them in business. Just because you can't read news "articles" longer than a 140 character tweet doesn't mean "nobody" enjoys reading long-format articles written by people who actually know how to string sentences together and have an intent in writing that's more than just "get the fools to click the link". And by the way, the US book publishing industry is bigger than the big 4 sports combined -- by a huge margin. So you really shouldn't believe people don't want to pay to read.

My problem with Apple News+ is that for the $120/year, I find it cheaper to subscribe to magazines directly. Most of the magazines are at most $20/year, and although Apple's list is impressive and diverse, it's hard to find 6 I'd actually pay for. I also do actively pay for and read 3 magazines that are not on News+, and fwiw, I prefer the print magazines, so for Apple to get my interest, they'd have to charge a lot less than subscribing to the print copies of all the magazines I'm interested in.

 

[riverfreak]

I would love it if it wasn't an objectively terrible way to read news. The app reading experience is bad. Worse, the newspaper selection is woeful and not improving.

Precisely. For most sources, the reading experience is much better in their native apps.

 

[Lobwedgephil]

I love magazines so I still subscribe, but the app is terrible.

 

[KrispE00]

The problem is that News+ only has a few months of back issues of most magazines. And hardly any of the magazines were displayed in the new “revolutionary” format. They’re just poor quality PDFs. After 1 month free, most people realized there’s nothing new about this subscription service. This needed a 1 year trial like TV+ to give the service time to grow.

 

[fumi2014]

The biggest worry with bundling is that this will mean the publishers get an even smaller cut from Apple so more will leave the service making it less attractive.

 

[ghostface147]

Odd issue with my Apple News. I have several sites blocked because I already read them online on their webpages and don't want them on my News feed. Now they just show up and when I go to block them, they say unblock. Weird. Maybe it's because I'm on 13.3 beta 2.

 

[Glockworkorange]

Well I for one am SHOCKED! /s

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I had a go at the trial and didn't find a problem with the magazines on offer (UK resident so can only vouch for our selection. In fact, I thought the selection was extremely generous when you consider the costs of print media these days.

The reasons why I'm not subscribing:

1. 'Reading' magazines and newspapers on my devices is the last thing that I would want to do. I buy magazines and newspapers to get away from computer screens, not stay on them. Interactive features are interesting, but I have an imagination anyway...

2. Although the service is (in my opinion), excellent value for the volume of content on offer, reading these materials is not the same as having a large music collection. I typically may only buy two newspapers a week, and no more than two magazines a month. That gives me plenty to read during commutes and breaks; so therefore having a large selection in digital form as all-you-can-read isn't going to change these behaviours.

Besides these, I find more tangible value in owning a physical copy of a particular magazine. It's quicker to take off a shelf and read, and particularly with Nat Geo, it's nice having them on display with other books.

 

[Glockworkorange]

I would love it if it wasn't an objectively terrible way to read news. The app reading experience is bad. Worse, the newspaper selection is woeful and not improving.

True.

Magazines in general are a poor choice.

Many are outdated by their current issue and then you're waiting a month for more outdated information.

The MacWorld and MacLife magazines come to mind--they'll be like "New--iPhone 11 Pro Review!" The release date of the magazine is like weeks after everyone else's reviews are out and there's zero reason to read them.

If Apple did a true "news" subscription, my feelings would be different.

 

[DevNull0]

Unfortunately , I was still getting clickbait headlines and opinion pieces. Not to mention the execution was poor. So I cancelled.

If they can find a way to better curate the sources , and make it easier to navigate, I’d come back.

This exactly. There are some great publications in there, but Apple is trying to break the magazine format and just show curated articles, and the result is a horrible click-baited mess that's essentially the usual echo chamber for each user. In Apple's model it no longer matters that magazine you're reading as long as you follow the clickbait.

If they'd make it easier to just sit down and read a magazine including back issues, it would be a much better service. Pretty much exactly what Texture was before Apple "fixed" it.

 

[nt5672]

maybe cos its full of fake news

Fake news or not, is not the issue. The issue is that it will only ever have news that Apple considers acceptable. And acceptable will change over time. I am or want to be a free person and get all of the news, whether Apple deems it acceptable or not. If Apple wants to be the new NYT then Apple can suffer the same fate of declining readership (or in Apple's case not increasing above the hobby level.)

 

[axantas]

Who reads newspapers and magazines any more? And the dwindling number of people that do are more likely to read the physical version than something on their iDevices.

Well, I do love it. It is kind of books, published on a monthly/weekly basis to me. And there is a gorgeous service, providing thousands of magazines from all over the world - there is even an app for that, but not the "tailored" Apple News-App...

 

[thomas040]

Well it's not very good. The user experience is kind of a little bit better than browsing PDF files. A lot of the magazines aren't optimized. I mean, why spend time flipping pages when you could have touch-links everywhere....? But most magazines don't. So it's a pretty subpar experience.

If they want to win over people to not buy regular magazines, they have to make the experience BETTER. Not just SCAN the pages, and put them in a PDF with a subpar navigation controls.

 

[TrenttonY]

If they had a bundle with Apple Music, News+, TV+, Apple Arcade, and 2 TB iCloud Drive all with family sharing for say $30 per month I might get on board. But all these separate services are getting out of control.

So you want to duplicate what the cable companies did that made you jump ship to online streaming services in the first place? "Bundling" doesn't equal lower prices.

 

[npmacuser5]

Terrible user interface. No consistent reading format, slow response, many outages, to name a few on the technical side. Example comparison, Google News vs Apple News user interface. No contest Google wins easily.

Content old school news rehashed. Apple needs to innovate news like they did with music and now TV. After two months cancelled the Apple+ News.

Reality, Apple went on the cheap by buying and using an already failing news subscription service. They needed to apply Apple touch sooner then later.

 

[DevNull0]

True.

Magazines in general are a poor choice.

Many are outdated by their current issue and then you're waiting a month for more outdated information.

The MacWorld and MacLife magazines come to mind--they'll be like "New--iPhone 11 Pro Review!" The release date of the magazine is like weeks after everyone else's reviews are out and there's zero reason to read them.

If Apple did a true "news" subscription, my feelings would be different.

I was all set to disagree with you, but you're right, and thinking about your post you've completely changed my point of view. It seems the people who love and hate magazines are looking at them in two different ways. As a source of the latest news, they really are an obsolete format as so many of the people here have been saying.

But the magazines I read are things like Scientific American, where I want an in-depth interesting read at a reasonably sophisticated level. If I read it a few months after the research was published it doesn't matter at all, and the mainstream media articles on-line dumb it down to the point it's meaningless clickbait headlines. I also read hobby-centric magazines in areas like gaming, woodcraft, and electronics. Those are not time sensitive and they're just fun to read. I can read a day zero game review (or watch Youtube videos), but reading the in depth articles a few weeks later is still fun.

So I do like magazines and read several a month in different genres, but not really as a source of current event news. All the people here saying magazines are dead are pretty much saying as a source of news and they're right. Apple didn't help matters by calling the service News+ when, to be fair, way more than half the magazines in the service are not news magazines anyway (which is a very good thing).

 

[StellarVixen]

maybe cos its full of fake news

Give this man a medal!



It is not the News+, it is the content that is problematic.

 

[petvas]

I don't think that there is really a big market for such a service. People are used in getting most information for free. Specific articles on very specialised topics are just a niche market and this is not what the majority is looking for. Apple News+ can never get really big. Another issue is that it is available only in a couple of countries and that definitely doesn't help its expansion.
As for myself, I don't remember when I last bought a magazine of any kind. The world has changed and nowadays we use YouTube and many ad supported websites for getting most of the information that the majority of people need.

 

[sers]

Subscription fatigue.

 

[DevNull0]

If they had a bundle with Apple Music, News+, TV+, Apple Arcade, and 2 TB iCloud Drive all with family sharing for say $30 per month I might get on board. But all these separate services are getting out of control.

Apple Music = $10
News+ = $10
TV+ = $5
Arcade = $5
iCloud Drive = $10.

$40 total (45 if you want to push the music family share point). $30 would both be a lot cheaper than Apple would go, and yet much too expensive to be a worthwhile bundle for most people.

That $10 News+ is only worth $10 to 1/70th of 1% of all iOS users. So far TV+ and Arcade have minimal subscribers. I don't know anyone paying for either. There are very few people who will be interested in that whole bundle.

Apple Music is DOA to me because of family sharing. I have multiple adults in my household who each have their own AppleID accounts and don't want to be on a family plan for paying for Apps on one credit card. Spotify family sharing just works. Apple Music family just flops, so that's another thing I wouldn't care to have in the bundle.
[automerge]1573766254[/automerge]

I don't think that there is really a big market for such a service. People are used in getting most information for free. Specific articles on very specialised topics are just a niche market and this is not what the majority is looking for.

It's 200+ magazines each covering small niches that make financial sense for that magazine. The majority are looking for articles on very specialized niche topics, the problem with News+ is that 95%+ of the magazines are in niches any given person just doesn't care about and the ones they do are cheaper to take a la carte from the publisher.

I subscribe to print magazines with circulations in the 25,000 range. How does that translate to Apple's News+ model?

 

[stylinexpat]

Apple Music = $10
News+ = $10
TV+ = $5
Arcade = $5
iCloud Drive = $10.

$40 total (45 if you want to push the music family share point). $30 would both be a lot cheaper than Apple would go, and yet much to expensive to be a worthwhile bundle for most people.

That $10 News+ is only worth $10 to 1/70th of 1% of all iOS users. So far TV+ and Arcade has minimal subscribers. I don't know anyone paying for either. There are very few people who will be interested in that whole bundle.

Apple Music is DOA to me because of family sharing. I have multiple adults in my household who each have their own AppleID accounts and don't want to be on a family plan for paying for Apps on one credit card. Spotify family sharing just works. Apple Music family just flops, so that's another thing I wouldn't care to have in the bundle.

$5 here and $10 there add up quickly for many in the US. I can see many paying but also can see many not paying. I can see more not paying

 

[Hofeman]

Well, isn’t this a huge surprise! I feel like I could have told them this was going to be a flop and saved a lot of heartache... maybe if they updated it every year to be a little more shiny and have a better font it would do better!

 

[CarlJ]

maybe cos its full of fake news

Not enough Breitbart for you?

 

[lewchenko]

I recently subscribed, and in the U.K. the content is decent. The app could be better but its usable.
I follow several magazines and it also has The Times here too which is pretty expensive on its own as a digital sub. I’m not sure we get all the content however for that newspaper, but it’s still decent enough.
Basically it saves me money, and I pick up a few magazines I didn’t already subscribe to. I’m a happy subscriber and I think it’s worth it.

 

[DevNull0]

Apple apparently paid $485 million for Texture, and then had their own costs modifying it into News+.

200,000 people paying $10/month is $24 million per year. It would take Apple more than 20 years to recoup their costs, if they didn't have to pay for infrastructure costs and royalties to the magazine publishers.

There is no way Apple is breaking even on this one.