Why ? I get both left & right wing news from Apple News. Only Breitbart gets a seperate app.
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.
Publishers Reportedly Struggling to Monetize Privacy-Centric Apple News
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Apple don’t often drop the ball on moving to new markets — give it a few years.
Really?!? Try Newton, HomePod, Siri, Pippin, Ping, AOCE, Mac Clones, iPod Hi-Fi… To name a few. Apple fails a lot in new markets. It's just their successes outweigh their failures.
I used to work for a major newspaper. The 50% Apple is asking for is just not reasonable for most struggling news outlets. Apple thinks they have a Napster situation on their hands again. This is not the case. Music was a commodity that people still wanted. News is a commodity that people can live without and (unfortunately) see no value in.
Rumored to be 50% cut you mean. In any case, absolutely irrelevant to my point. The person I quoted said Apple was simply trying to profit on the work of others. That’s what a newsstand does. Same as any retail store. How much of a cut that vendor makes is irrelevant. The person I quoted was just trying to make a snide remark that wouldn’t hold up. Personally, I don’t care what cut Apple wants. That’s a business negotiation and terms are rarely fully understood by the outside world.
Traffic boosts without sufficient revenues still results in going out of business. The terrible ad practices online have largely been driven by desperation to stay viable, but now the backlash is leading to even less revenue. I want privacy but I don't want zero news outlets surviving.
I'd still rather buy a physical magazine tbh.
Anyway, Apple News could be a winner, if Apple wasn't, yet again, so incredibly greedy. I feel like they just seem to be milking not only their customers, but partners too.
50%? insane.
Anyway, Apple News could be a winner, if Apple wasn't, yet again, so incredibly greedy. I feel like they just seem to be milking not only their customers, but partners too.
50%? insane.
This is actually a good problem, for humanity. In recent years real journalism has faded with the rise of click-bait articles instead. The click-bait has been great for business so everything has shifted towards low quality content.
Now they are butthurt they can no longer monetise their rubbish the way they used to. This is great! This may mean that we will turn around and see ways of monetising quality content instead.
I don't think the major problem here is getting people to pay, if only one service could give you all the content. The fragmentation is to me a huge problem. I don't want to pay for a whole load of services/magazines/pages. I'm happy to pay for one though, like if Apple news one a one-stop-shop to all the various pay walls they support. Like Apple music for instance, it gives you music from multiple labels. You don't have to get a subscription from each label.
Now they are butthurt they can no longer monetise their rubbish the way they used to. This is great! This may mean that we will turn around and see ways of monetising quality content instead.
I don't think the major problem here is getting people to pay, if only one service could give you all the content. The fragmentation is to me a huge problem. I don't want to pay for a whole load of services/magazines/pages. I'm happy to pay for one though, like if Apple news one a one-stop-shop to all the various pay walls they support. Like Apple music for instance, it gives you music from multiple labels. You don't have to get a subscription from each label.
Not 50%, but margins in the print magazine business are extremely small. PP&B (print, paper, binding) and distribution alone eat up significant chunks of revenue.
Online advertising is a horrific model for consumers; I hope that in the next few years we see an extinction event in the online publishing / advertising industry.
Quality unbiased news in this day and age? That's very hard. My man Denzel is spot on.
True, the 50% cut is rumored. It is however relevant to the portion of your comment I addressed. You asked how Apple is different from a newsstand. I said they differ in their revenue sharing amounts. So yeah, relevant. I can't find any reliable data (everything seems to be anecdotal around 10-15% off cover) on the percentage that newsstands average on mag/newspaper sales. I'm pretty sure those margins are slim as heck.
Everything I've read says a typical newsstand gets approx 10-15% off cover price. It's all anecdotal so grain of salt and all. Regardless, that's far from 50% that Apple's rumored to be asking.
Apple News has been a useful nice app. I'd subscribe to something like that instead of different individual newspapers etc.. The 50% cuts sounds like a problem, but the news orgs embrace of the surveillance capitalism of their users is probably a problem as well. They probably won't want something that respects their users privacy to succeed - as its totally different direction than what they're trying to do.
The National Enquirer? Really? Gotta call no way on that assessment. TV is a lost cause for the most part, I agree there.
While most of the newspaper operations (particularly local papers) are being gobbled up by a couple of massive owners and given the core meltdown strategy - there are still a few big ones (Washington Post - they call both sides of the political aisle there and the NY Times are both growing and doing well - allowing them to have staff to do articles beyond the garbage you see in alot of places like the Nat Enq). I'd have thrown the WSJ in there as well but since Murdoch took it over he forced them to change to the english news article model of warping news articles through the lens of editorialism (where you end up with alot of newsish propaganda) - instead of the old american model where news and editorials are kept separate.
The National Enquirer? Really? Gotta call no way on that assessment. TV is a lost cause for the most part, I agree there.
While most of the newspaper operations (particularly local papers) are being gobbled up by a couple of massive owners and given the core meltdown strategy - there are still a few big ones (Washington Post - they call both sides of the political aisle there and the NY Times are both growing and doing well - allowing them to have staff to do articles beyond the garbage you see in alot of places like the Nat Enq). I'd have thrown the WSJ in there as well but since Murdoch took it over he forced them to change to the english news article model of warping news articles through the lens of editorialism (where you end up with alot of newsish propaganda) - instead of the old american model where news and editorials are kept separate.
Last edited:
advertisers never used to be able to track your ass until relatively recently and everyone still made a boat load of money. Now that they can, they're addicted to it like crack and the thought of withdrawal is sending them into a tizzy. Poor poor advertisers. It must be weird having a job where what you produce is despised by all (except your client).
I don't understand this paid news subscription in the internet!! If the source can't be shared with your social circle (for which your social circle must be subscribing the services as well) then it's not worth subscribing to... enough BS news articles from competing sources more than enough! Avoiding ad targetting is not a great excuse to pay monthly subscription fee!!
Last edited:
If the sub service replaces ads, will that solve the revenue issues for the publishers? I don't think it will at the rumored 50Apple/50Shared split.
Last edited:
I like Apple News in general, but I can't curate it to my liking. For example, it shows articles I already read in Safari. I don't want to read what I already read. I choose dislike story frequently, but it still shows stuff from websites I've visited throughout the day.
This has 'fail' written all over it. There's enough free news all over the web; no-one needs this and the outlets will struggle to make any money thanks to Apple's lovely 50/50 split. High margins everywhere, eh Tim?
(And, as much has he BBC website now appears to be written by kids based on 'what we've seen on Twitter', it still covers my bases for the news highlights of the day.)
(And, as much has he BBC website now appears to be written by kids based on 'what we've seen on Twitter', it still covers my bases for the news highlights of the day.)
It's not, nor it is different than every business that sells music, or stores that are full of products from manufacturers, but none of that matters because you are dealing with the Apple haters who troll this site, they are here to try to make themselves feel better about their Android purchases, not deal with facts.
Newspaper have to come up with headlines that will have to catch the eyes of the public and interesting enough that they want to pay. I get that with digital format and access to the internet, competition and cost to print has become a great challenge for newspaper companies but they are still obligated to gather the facts before going to print. Some have editorial sections and the articles written have been based on the reporter's opinion and without research. I have been a long time regular reader of one of the local newspapers from my area. I no longer buy that newspaper and it has been quite a few years since my last purchase. As for the TV news, I stopped watching but I'll leave it at that.
You don't understand how a news/magazine subscriptions service would work if you are comparing it to "free" news. This would enable people to not have to pay and manage multiple subscriptions for content that isn't free, which people currently can't afford to/don't want to do. Texture, for example, enables you to have access to over 200 magazines with paywalls with one monthly fee.
Most people are also missing out on the fact that in addition to whatever portion of a monthly subscriber pool a publisher would get, the larger revenue would likely come from the ability to charge advertisers more for the increased number of viewers. For example, the NYT, one of the few digital paywalls that appears to have had some success, only has about 2 million subscribers. Apple News could potentially add millions of new readers to their articles.
People seem to complain about "garbage news". You could also argue garbage news comes from websites that have to rely on website advertising for revenue where page visits are more important than content quality.
Apple should work-out a proper arrangement with news and content publishers for Apple News. Otherwise eventually the app could suck because news outlets can't afford to maintain quality content.
Apple should work-out a proper arrangement with news and content publishers for Apple News. Otherwise eventually the app could suck because news outlets can't afford to maintain quality content.
I definitely hate all the ads on news sites these days. There are still a LOT of BS ads that look like news articles at first glance until you see the fine print and figure out it is just an ad trying to look like a news story. With all the fake news these ads just make a mockery of most news websites even when that news site doesn't publish fake news. Mixing real news articles in with ads that look like news articles is not helping the matter at all. But as annoying as the ads are, I would rather filter through them than pay for an ad free news site.