Another day, another third-party platform offers hope for publishers. Reports over the past few months have suggested that at least some media outlets are making decent money from Apple News.
The most recent stats for the platform show that Apple News had a total of 125mn active users. That’s a big chunk of audience. And, of course, those people are interacting with content in an Apple-designed environment to maximise engagement on a device it controls.
That’s particularly useful when it comes to Apple News+, the paid-for programme that has apparently been paying dividends. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, The Daily Beast is on track to generate $3-4mn in revenue from Apple News alone this year, with other publishers such as Time magazine potentially bringing in seven figures.
A separate report estimates that almost a quarter of Apple’s install base in the US – somewhere in the region of 120mn people – are subscribed to Apple News, up from 15% in 2020. Previous estimates have suggested that the paid for service could have hit 19mn subscribers in 2023, so it’s not unreasonable to suggest there might be some 20-30mn subscribers in the US alone, paying $12.99 a month (£12.99 in the UK).
If there are 20mn Apple News+ subscribers paying that fee, that works out at something like $250mn in revenue for Apple. That’s basically a rounding error for Apple, but even the smallish chunk publishers can get from that is nothing to sneer at. Apple takes half of the fee and splits the rest among partners based on time spent with their content, making a theoretical pool of $125mn. For those that also join the “News Partnership Programme” by publishing extensively to Apple News, there is also the offer of a reduced commission for Apple of 15% from 30% for direct subscriptions to their own apps. Those numbers are very much not rounding errors for news organisations.
There remains the challenge of getting content on to Apple News. I remember dipping the New Statesman’s toes into the platform back in the mid 2010s. There were technical requirements which were more arduous than working with, say, Google’s Amp low load format, but they were not insurmountable. More resource intensive was flagging the kind of stories that would perform well on the platform to the (very helpful) Apple News editors, and if you really wanted to make the most of it, it you were encouraged to consider the big events in the Apple News calendar and make sure you had something ready to go that would slot in to a package nicely. It was, in many ways, like having an extra set of editors.
Of course, if someone like the Daily Beast can make $4mn doing that, it’s a no brainer, at least if you discount any possibility it impacts the rest of your business.
The big holdout for Apple News is the New York Times (for reasons that make sense for NYT, ie it’s got the audience and doesn’t want to share it). And Apple News has been introducing games content – which feels a bit like a challenge to the NYT strategy.
A senior industry source said that the Apple News Platform as a whole makes a lot of sense for smaller publications that are trying to open up new audiences, as well as publications trying to make a mark in overseas regions where Apple saturation is high. The trade off, however, is that you are handing over the “curational gateway” to a third party. That will inevitably make your ability to deepen engagement with readers, and get them to potentially subscribe or at the very least keep coming back to your owned properties, more challenging.
One thing that does appear to be different for Apple News audiences, said the source, is that while you do get the kind of big spikes in views but huge drop offs in attention that come from other platforms such as Reddit, there are often a large subset of people coming to content via Apple News that do engage deeply with stories they find via the platform. That speaks to the value of the audience on offer, and suggests that it can be a good way to bring people into closer relationships.
There is always the concern, said the senior industry figure, that Apple might follow Google in implementing new AI features that disrupt publishers’ ability to make the platform work for them. Apple’s comparatively cautious approach to implementing AI so far is of some reassurance here. And with Google’s rather more gung-ho approach to introducing AI to search, it might even be even more important to make the most of a second source of third party traffic.
“Are news publishers in a better place if they have at least two significant refers? Are we better having two strong referrers who you can playoff against each other?. How comfortable are you completely reverting just to Google driving external referrers, especially with AI overviews coming down the line and coming in a way that it is really hard to predict?”
At the same time, they said, publishers need to be aware that even the kind of good deal they are getting from Apple right now may not always be such a great fit.
“They should have a fairly clear tipping point where they feel like whatever the commercial or audience benefits are at the very top level, they should have a clear point in their mind where that stops being beneficial if you’re handing over the keys to the direct traffic to Apple.”
It’s a lesson you hope publishers have learned from their previous, sometimes disastrous, entanglements with third party platforms promising riches. It can – of course – be a game changer for a publisher, until the terms of the game change.
