Apple News+ publishers aren’t happy with their payouts

Evan Niu for The Motley Fool:

Apple has high hopes for Apple News+, the premium news subscription service it launched in March. Content publishers had long been frustrated with poor monetization in the free version of Apple News, and a subscription fee could prop up the underlying economics of the paid version of the service. However, Apple wants half of all that subscription revenue, leaving publishers to divvy up the rest based on their proportionate share of engagement.

It’s not going well.

Business Insider reported last week that Apple is already considering making changes to the service to address a wide range of issues… One publishing exec told the outlet that the revenue has been “one twentieth” of what Apple forecast, and that the revenue is comparable to how much they were getting from Texture — which is to say, not a lot. Many publishers feel like News+ is an unfinished product and that Apple isn’t really all that committed to it, according to the report. Perhaps most troubling is a lack of underlying demand to begin with. Magazines have been in a long-term decline for years, and no one was clamoring for a service that offered subscription-based access to hundreds of periodicals. “No one wants all-you-can-eat magazine content,” one executive told BI.

MacDailyNews Take: Are you an Apple News+ subscriber? If so, what do you like best about it?

Everyone should at least give Apple News+ a try since it’s free for the first month. If you don’t like it, cancel before the first month end. If you like it, it costs $9.99/month to subscribe to Apple News+.

As for Apple News, search for “MacDailyNews” and favorite us, please!

13 Comments

  1. As a news aggregator, Apple News+ works pretty well for me, and exposes me to outlets I would not see otherwise. I am a mild news junkie, and this seems to hit most of the bases for me. Carrying separate subscriptions to WaPo and NYT seems excessive, but having them all in one place is really convenient.

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