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At its presentation on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook presented the company's news subscription service about the joy of standing in front of a newsstand. "I like the feeling of being at the newsstand," he said. "With all these beautiful and stimulating magazines that cover many topics." The goal of the new Apple News Plus service, said Cook, would incorporate this feeling into the Apple ecosystem.
But if Apple News is supposed to be the digital equivalent of a newsstand, it misses a big element: newspapers. Apple News Plus gives access to more than 300 high-level journalism magazines, such as New Yorker at the mass celebrity market like People. But the service was able to recruit only three major newspapers – The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Toronto Star. This is a strange weak point in the service that could seriously compromise Cook's goal of creating an all-in-one place to read the news.
If you look at the origins of the project, it is not surprising that the service is also heavily focused on periodicals. Apple News Plus inherits most of its content from the Texture app, known as "Netflix Magazine", acquired by Apple at the same time last year. Since the year, Apple seems to have worked hard to improve Texture's offering by focusing more on individual items, offering referral features and adding more magazine titles.
After the acquisition, Apple has not made much progress. Apple has signed several digital publications, including the Cut, Vultureand one Vox Legal mentions called The climax. (Disclosure: Vox and The edge share the same parent company). Its lack of paid information services is also mitigated by the fact that a large number of websites and newspapers are available for free. Even many paid publications will still send a small amount of content to Apple News.
But the major national newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have chosen not to join Apple's subscription service and offer full access to their stories. It's probably because they do not need it. These newspapers have had a surge of subscribers in recent years – Time recently reached 3 million digital subscriptions, the To post claims that its subscriptions have tripled in volume in two years, making them less dependent on a third-party aggregator willing to only offer them a portion of a fraction of their usual fees. (The Time provides a small number of articles for free via Apple News; the To post offer none.)
Apple also reportedly proposed poor conditions for newspapers: Apple would absorb about half of the press service's $ 10 a month charge, leaving only $ 5 a month for each subscriber to split between the newspapers and magazines they would read. It's a tough deal: Apple accounts for only 30% of App Store sales, which many already consider too high, especially for newspapers that already manage to find paid subscribers themselves.
That said, we do not know how many other publishers have even been offered the opportunity to decline their place in the service of Apple. Local news is struggling; a recent study found that nearly one in five local newspapers has disappeared in the last 15 years. And papers with names smaller than the Time probably not the weight needed to get millions of subscribers on their own. Even Gannett, the owner of United States today and dozens of local newspapers, has only half a million digital subscribers. This could make Apple's conditions more attractive. The disappearance of local newspapers – and the role played by technology – is to such an extent that Google and Facebook are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support them because their products are of better quality when they have access to more high quality products. stories to link.
Newspapers that join Apple have the benefit of reaching readers who may not have found their stories otherwise. And most likely, this is a lot of readers: the application is integrated with all iPhone, iPad and Mac, and is open by 85 million people each month. Transferring even a percentage of these people to subscribers means giving publications access to hundreds of thousands of paid readers they did not have before. This potential was apparently what brought the Newspaper on board – he can probably find new readers without losing people who would still pay a subscription, which would allow them to read everything on the newspaper's website.
This is also the argument that finally convinced magazine publishers. according to recodingTexture has always paid magazine publishers about half of the revenue from their subscriptions, giving them the same terms as newspapers. The point of sale was simply that they would have access to many more paid readers. (The main publishers were also originally co-owners of Texture, they received a smaller discount until Apple took over.)
Magazines and newspapers can also display ads in Apple News Plus. For newspapers, this looks like the banners you see on their websites. For magazines, these are ads already printed on their pages, which makes them potentially even more useful. If you've already received a magazine in the mail long after you've stopped paying, you're probably aware that a publisher sometimes prefers to lose your money instead of losing you as a reader.
Apple seems almost resigned, for the moment, not to have newspapers. He framed the introduction of Apple News Plus around magazines and only briefly mentioned the sources of information at the end of his presentation. And given the huge amount of free news that Apple can publish, it may not be as concerned to make News Plus – a misnomer, clearly – a complete source of information.
But if Apple really wants to rebuild the newsstand, he has work to do. As shown by the investments of Google and Facebook, an information product only has the quality of its reports. There is already an incredible amount of incredible journalism available on Apple News and News Plus. But for the moment, Apple has not yet crossed the most important payment barriers in the industry, which could leave readers wondering again.
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