This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence " Digital Media Briefing" subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here.

Apple News — Apple's news aggregation app for iOS and macOS devices — has built its reach to 90 million regular readers since first launching in June 2015, a new report by the New York Times revealed last week.

Business Insider Intelligence

For context, the service counted 70 million unique users as of November 2016, and competing news aggregation platform Flipboard now reaches 145 million users monthly.

Regardless of competing news services' reach, Apple's milestone highlights its ability to drive engagement for news organizations — Vice's traffic from Apple News has more than doubled in the past year, while Meredith has seen a 122% growth in visitors reaching its properties via Apple News, for example.

Aside from regularly reaching 90 million people, there are several other factors that make Apple News an attractive distribution platform for publishers:

  • The service's human vetting process makes it less prone to hosting misinformation than other digital platforms. Apple News' editor in chief Lauren Kern leads a team of about 30 former journalists that field 100 to 200 pitches a day from publishers, and they ultimately select five stories to lead the app. This approach has helped Apple avoid the fake news struggles of Google and Facebook, which rely more heavily on algorithms to determine trending headlines. It's possible that Apple News' vetting process is indirectly helping boost engagement with its ads, as evidence suggests the absence of fake news on a platform can boost users' likelihood of interacting with an ad.
  • It's likely easier for many users to subscribe to publishers on Apple News than on other platforms. Apple News lets readers subscribe to publishers on mobile devices with a single tap, using Touch ID, which uses consumers' preloaded credit card information. This seamless sign-up paves the way for Apple News users to subscribe impulsively, a behavior that is much harder to encourage when users have to enter their credit card information manually, as is the case for most other sites. The Washington Post has found "early success" in converting Apple News readers into paying subscribers, according to Washington Post lead product manager Dave Merrell, per Business Insider.

At the same time, companies should be wary not to put all their chips on Apple News, as monetization ability varies from publisher to publisher. Though several publishers have seen their Apple News audiences multiply in 2018, monetization of these extra eyeballs has proven a challenge for some. The amount of revenue Slate makes from its average six million monthly page views from Apple News is about equal to its earnings from a single article with 50,000 page views on its own site, for example.

It's also worth noting that Apple takes a 30% cut of publisher subscription revenue the first year, and 15% for every subscription year thereafter, compared with Google's 5% and Facebook, which takes no percentage at all. Nonetheless, these factors shouldn't completely deter publishers from Apple News, as its subscription and traffic-driving potential can help companies supplement declining referrals from elsewhere, like social platforms.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-news-reaches-90-million-readers-2018-10
www.businessinsider.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-26
219128
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RFXA75VQ6QLR3JMQDCNT4SYCBQVXJF5P
<urn:uuid:92c25ca4-9d2a-439b-8d65-27c0ff5ee1a3>
2019-06-18T01:12:54Z
151.101.249.171
text/html
sha1:JYD5U5WSDQ2MRDLK7IGKS2RZXYA52QYO
<urn:uuid:cb44dd93-53e4-4ff4-bd3f-e998c3e98c68>
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-news-reaches-90-million-readers-2018-10
response
<urn:uuid:71988540-5586-4969-81f9-cc3a124c5347>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-158-222-202.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/