Where do you get WaPo for 99 cents?
It's a deal solely for .edu addresses (which I was lucky enough to keep mine despite graduating over 5 years ago).
Where do you get WaPo for 99 cents?
I agree it makes little sense for them.
Apple is very good at commoditising others' work. Turning the content (music, movies, apps, now news) into cheap commodities that help sell Apple products at high margins. Plus Apple gets a (big) cut on the service end, so it's win-win; for Apple.
I'd be very skeptical it always makes sense for the content producers though. They reduce their cut substantially; plus they concede control of the market and lose contact with their customer base. If everyone signs up, Apple becomes a Goliath that is very hard to argue/deal/bargain with.
I agree that a news subscription is a good idea; that's why I was curious about it in the first place.
The 50% revenue split is what I have a problem with. Apple cannot seriously claim that they deserve a cut level with the people who actually create the content. They're just trying to throw their weight around.
this subscription service is gonna fail
Without Washington Post and NYT (2 out of the 3 subscriptions I have), this is a dead service to me. Nice try Apple. Better luck next time.
The only news outlets who might be served by using Apple for distribution are new, lesser known, or perhaps regional organizations like individual NPR content providers with independent local features/content. They might actually stand to gain a little with increased distribution, even with a 50% hit. Major content providers have nothing to gain.
News & content curated by Apple? Yeah no thanks. I don't want Lil' Timmy's agenda shoved down my throat
I’m in for this reason alone:
“Apple is also declining to provide credit card information or email addresses to publishers, details that news sites use to create customer databases and market their products, and they're asking partners to provide unlimited access to content.”
Hopefully there’s a family subscription plan!
Remember Mac Life/Mac Addict magazine? Ahh the good old days. I was just cleaning my office at home a came across every issue on a shelf. Funny how if you read the news stories, little has changed. I cannot think of a magazine or news paper I would want to pay for today. I hope I am wrong.
I just know that, as part of my online subscriptions, an included feature is little or no advertising. That's a fairly common feature of online subscriptions or "premium" services. Youtube has a similar offering. Those kinds of offerings may be unique to online subscriptions, where popups and streaming interrupts are far more annoying than the old print advertisements, which were much easier to ignore and were often placed in sections of the paper or magazine devoted exclusively to advertising and/or "fluff" content. My assumption is that online subscription fees are charged according to the publisher's calculation of equivalent advertising revenue per user. As you say, advertising provided the bulk of the income of traditional print publications. As people began reading online rather than via print, traditional newspapers and magazines became less attractive for advertisers. Income for want-adds and job posting sections (the Classifieds) also steeply declined. The money-making model for online publishing is still evolving. I currently pay $16/month for NYT online, and really only get advertisements in sections like entertainment or real estate, where the primary content involves advertising. Those were the sections I generally ignored in print newspapers.You don't know how the magazines and newspapers financials work. Subscriptions are the smallest portion of revenue-they survive on advertising, which is why they have been going out of business as ad revenue declines because so few people are reading their articles. This is why hundreds of magazines jumped on Texture; their best hope of staying in business is to get more eyeballs on articles which leads to more advertising dollars.
If WSJ offers full access through the Apple News model, they apparently see it as a plus for them to participate. They currently offer digital subscriptions for $20/mo. for 6 months, or $16/mo. for 12 months. If they offer the same content through Apple for $10/mo. per subscriber, what is their loss compared to their regular subscription services? If Apple takes 50% off the top, does that mean all participating publishers get some small slice of the remaining $5/mo. per subscriber? That would be a rather huge hit financially, and would require a substantial increase in the subscriber base to come out even or make profit over the older model. Apparently NYT and WaPo didn't bite.If you want to subscribe for the WSJ it's about 29£/month. I can see a lot of people that are in the Apple ecosystem that could benefit a lot by paying less than half as much and having other newspapers included. It's actually a steal
Remember Mac Life/Mac Addict magazine? Ahh the good old days. I was just cleaning my office at home a came across every issue on a shelf. Funny how if you read the news stories, little has changed. I cannot think of a magazine or news paper I would want to pay for today. I hope I am wrong.
It seems to me most major publishers probably would not want to be part of this. Imagine not able to make a marketing campaign out of this. What good would this do if Apple gives their customer unlimited access, but the publisher will learn next to nothing about the customer?
That is an interesting idea. While I prefer the model of unlimited access to the content of participating publishers, your pay per article idea might be more acceptable to a larger number of publishers. I still wouldn't like having to do it on a site by site basis (giving my credit card info to a dozen different newspapers) but Apple could easily facilitate letting me search for articles of interest across all the participating publishers and maybe even giving me the first 1 or 2 paragraphs free (like a preview of a song on iTunes). I could then click to read whatever articles I want and let Apple handle the billing and payments to the publisher. Apple could even set it up on a "credit" or "token" system where I pay $10 for 100 credits then each publisher could decide whether to charge 1, 2, 3 credits on an article by article basis depending on its length, quality, etc.What would really work in my opinion is if these guys instituted a system in which I pay for the article I want to read. I have had a subscription to NYT three times and three times I have unsubscribed to it. I just read fewer and fewer articles until I stop reading all together. Then later they publish something I want to read. Just make it per article. Sometimes the WSJ has something interesting. But not often enough to make me want to pay their high subscription price.
Where I am concerned, all of these publishers at one time or another have something I am interested in. But none of them have something I am interested in on a daily basis. So Apple’s model is appealing. Right now I have a subscription to the Washington post because its cheap enough and publishes something I want often enough to justify the cost.
I like Apple’s news app a lot. I think this is a good idea. I guess we’ll see if that’s right or not. I do like that Apple is keeping our info out of their hands. I don’t like the whole BIG DATA thing going on. I just want to read an article here and there. Why they want so much info on top of me paying for access is beyond me. If they want it to make more money, just charge more for the access to the article and stop selling our data. I’m not okay with what they are doing with our data.
When I buy a novel the bookstore learns nothing about me. When I buy comic books the retailer learns nothing about me. When I used to have my newspaper delivered (yes... I’m old!), the newspaper printer learned nothing about me. When I buy magazines the retailer learns nothing about me.
For literally hundreds and hundreds of years, published works have been enjoyed by umpteen billions of people WITHOUT THE PUBLISHER DATA MINING THE CONSUMER.
It is absolutely disgusting (in my eyes) that now “but I can’t creep on your information, that you have no interest in sharing with me” would be an argument that anyone would consider even remotely reasonable or valid.
If you get something for FREE (Facebook, et al), you could reasonably expect them to “pay themselves” by helping themselves to all the information they can glean...
However, if you actually PAY for a service- in what world should you also let them cyber stalk you & try to extract more cash from you??
Sarcasm?
Big mistake for these papers...at least try it for a while.
That is an interesting idea. While I prefer the model of unlimited access to the content of participating publishers, your pay per article idea might be more acceptable to a larger number of publishers. I still wouldn't like having to do it on a site by site basis (giving my credit card info to a dozen different newspapers) but Apple could easily facilitate letting me search for articles of interest across all the participating publishers and maybe even giving me the first 1 or 2 paragraphs free (like a preview of a song on iTunes). I could then click to read whatever articles I want and let Apple handle the billing and payments to the publisher. Apple could even set it up on a "credit" or "token" system where I pay $10 for 100 credits then each publisher could decide whether to charge 1, 2, 3 credits on an article by article basis depending on its length, quality, etc.
Like you, I also would prefer to do this through Apple for data privacy issues.
I don't think this is going to fail. Think about it this way, 3 million people pay 10 bucks a month just for nytimes. I'm one of them. So, if nyt got on board here, it would be a no brainer for me. I'm likely going to try it anyway. If you like news, than getting some new access is exciting. It doesn't need to be widely adopted
But the nyt isn’t going to get on board. So I’m not understanding your logic. Now if they were as well as most local papers. Sign me up. But this isn’t that. The wsj is a welcome surprise but I already get that free. Guess we’ll see who else.
This is reader friendly. Most of us don't want to give our personal information to publishers so they can resell and use it for their own purposes. Apple gives anonymized information to them, and gives the most important information: what is read !
Think about it. When you buy a newspaper at the newsstand, does the publisher get your personal information??????? Why would you be so anxious to give someone your private data????
Or what you do. That's the sad point. And you continue to worship Apple.Good! I don't think they or anyone else cares much what you do........
Tough to say one way or the other definitively having not seen the service, and it'll probably be up to the publisher, but I'm sure many will go with either all their digital content or all digital content from the last x weeks/months for Apple News subscribers.
That replica edition you mention is…unlikely, I'd say.