Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to more services coming this year, and this week we're learning more about what the company has in store for news. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Apple has been in talks with publishers about a subscription news service that would be a new paid tier of its existing Apple News app. However, the company has been butting heads with publishers over monetary details—Apple reportedly wants to keep 50 percent of subscription revenue from the service.
[...] In addition, Apple wouldn't share customer data with publishers. Information including credit card numbers and email addresses would not be provided to publishers if they agreed to Apple's terms as they currently stand. That information can be crucial for publishers to grow their subscriber base, market new products to readers, and more.
Will news publishers take half of the subscription revenue and forego money from customer profiling and tracking?
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New York Times CEO warns publishers ahead of Apple news launch
Apple Inc is expected to launch an ambitious new entertainment and paid digital news service on Monday, as the iPhone maker pushes back against streaming video leader Netflix Inc. But it likely will not feature the New York Times Co.
Mark Thompson, chief executive of the biggest U.S. newspaper by subscribers, warned that relying on third-party distribution can be dangerous for publishers who risk losing control over their own product.
"We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else," he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. "We're also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix (blender) with everyone else's journalism."
Thompson, who took over as New York Times CEO in 2012 and has overseen a massive expansion in its online readership, warned publishers that they may suffer the same fate as television and film makers in the face of Netflix's Hollywood insurgence.
See also: Apple secures deal with WSJ for paid Apple News service, NYT and Washington Post opt out
Apple reaches deal with Vox for upcoming Apple News subscription service, report says
Apple is on a hardware-launching bonanza ahead of its big TV announcement
Apple teams with media literacy programs in the US and Europe
Previously: Apple in Talks to Create "Netflix for News" Subscription Service
Apple just announced Apple News Plus, a news subscription service for $9.99 a month
Apple announced a new subscription news service, Apple News Plus, on Monday during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Starting Monday, the company said, Apple News Plus will curate articles from more than 300 news outlets and magazines via the Apple News app for $9.99 a month.
Apple says magazines and articles included with the Apple News Plus subscription will appear in a new tab on the Apple News app in a redesign released later Monday as part of an iOS software update.
Apple News Plus will feature content from several major news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times as well as the more than 300 magazines that were included with Texture, the digital magazine app Apple purchased last year. Notably absent among national news brands are The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Though Apple's app offers a significant discount for publications like The [Wall Street] Journal, which charges $19.50 a month for an all-access digital subscription, it appears that Apple subscribers will not have full access to all the partners' content. Reports Monday cited an internal memo as saying only some Journal articles, for example, would be offered via Apple News Plus, with The Journal's business reporting remaining exclusive to direct subscribers.
Apple Arcade Announced: New Game Subscription Service Coming To iOS, Mac, Apple TV This Year
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:00PM (6 children)
Hollywood, movie creators, music creators, news creators, book authors, etc, ALWAYS over-value the content.
They don't realize that online digital platforms, whether news reading, apps, streaming, digitally delivered mp3s, or whatever, cost ACTUAL MONEY to build and operate. And then on top of that, a profit is necessary.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:09PM (3 children)
And everybody overestimates the willingness of the consumers to subscribe to 20 different $10/month services.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday February 13 2019, @10:34PM
exactly - Netflix, Amazon - everything else "da interwebs". Not paying for a 3rd.
We live in an age of massive over-saturation of media. I would say however that such news as The Atlantic, Medium and The Financial Times, and occasionally WSJ/NYT are often quite high quality.
The problem is news is no long fact based. Too many "may happen, seems like, opinions etc etc." ad nauseum, rather than objective analysis of events.
Added to insane politics with dogma ruling everything, and $CORPS voting *twice* (once as human, then again as company).
Apple is probably going to make $$, but nothing like the success of Itunes.
My $0.02...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:06AM
Yeah. Because, you know, in their mind, a subscription is the only imaginable way to access a content.
I seem to remember a time where you could pay cents/pennies for a newspaper bought on the street; also remember rumors of a place where a nickel would allow you to see a movie with a roof over your head [wikipedia.org] - but maybe my mind grew old and these are figments of my imagination.
As it also be only my imagination saying that an internet-enabled micro-payment site is not a quite that hard a technological challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:18AM
My peak salary was $130k in 2008, my peak hourly was $120 in Y2K.
When I joined the Cub Scouts, Mom bought me a subscription to Boy's Life. That I do such things as "Hi, my name's Mike, what's yours?" to a _floridly_ paranoid and angry young meth-head at Starbucks the other day is due to Boy's Life monthly feature of a Boy Scout, a Cub or a Scouring Alumnus saving the life of another. In some issues, they gave their own lives by doing so.
In Eighth Grade, I subscribed to Analog and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. In High School, Galileo and Omni as well.
Get This: Omni's typeface, text page template and just about everything other than the... photographs... was Just Like Penthouse, because Guccione published Omni too. That led Mom to believe I'd sit quietly reading "The Insightful Articles" every evening, and all day on weekends.
My last couple years of High School, I subscribed to the Journal Of The Astronomical Society Of The Pacific.
But as an adult? Nothing.
If it weren't for the crisis that dead-tree publishers are facing, I never would. But I recently decided that I'd have The Columbian and The Oregonian dead trees delivered to NedSpace, quite likely The New York Times as well.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday February 13 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)
Uh huh. So you think 50% of all of the profits is remotely fucking reasonable? There's profit, and then there's raping the content creators. Like somebody else pointed out, this is raping the rapers.
With shit like this, the content creators see pennies [youtu.be].
There's no way you can convince me that Apple needs 50% of the profits to have that necessary profit. You say a profit is necessary? Technically 20% of the profits is actually profiting. Also, your observation that it costs actual money to operate the servers isn't something that people are unaware of. That's why it says "profits" and not "revenue". Apple isn't stupid. They're going to roll whatever operating costs that they possibly fucking can into that contract. Salt, Pepper, napkins, coffee creamer, TP, every office supply, every single line-item charge the bean counters can categorize as operating costs comes before they even discuss the profits for the content creators.
This is why the smartest content creators are cutting Apple and the publishers out entirely with new business models. Not every place is going to fuck them over like Apple and these publishers. CK Louis did this with his comedy, and some other comics, and sold DRM-free recordings of his shows. He seems to have figured out how to create, pay for, and operate an online digital platform, aka some servers in a data center.
You know what else is an online digital platform, and it doesn't require profit? Content Sharing, aka Piracy. Those "ACTUAL MONEY" costs are not as extreme as you think they are, and commercial CDN's exist to help efficiently distribute content. Not to mention, this isn't unknown territory either, with a lot of the technology required already existing, and quite possibly, open source.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday February 13 2019, @10:40PM
If the Rapers start treating "big tech" more reasonably, and stop acting like it is everyone else's job to police the internet for their copyright infringement, maybe I would have more sympathy for them. They should stop acting like "big tech" is the enemy, stop acting like the internet should be turned into a broadcast medium. Stop hating on creative commons and stop thinking that nothing should be available without some sort of payment. Stop the false DMCA takedowns that are of content their own marketing agents put up on the internet for promotional purposes.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:19PM (2 children)
No thanks.
I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:34PM (1 child)
Apple makes an iTonsillectomy device that extracts your tonsils through your doohickey.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:09AM
Lemme guess... and "it just works". Right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:32PM (1 child)
I'm not a fan of either Apple or publishers, but it's hilarious to watch Apple make these people squirm. 50%? Apple is smoking crack again trying to take hard earned money away from people that really make it money. No different than the App stores being the programmer's version of the NBA; Only so many can live the dream.
Apple denying them tracking and the ability to fuck over people's privacy and use their data is rich. It's not like publishers are doing extremely well either with stories about them hemorrhaging jobs. This is Apple giving them a tiny little fucked up life boat to try and survive. It will essentially be the publishers working for Apple's profits, and being relegated to live on the scraps.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:35PM
It will essentially be the publishers working for Apple's profits, and being relegated to live on the scraps.
'publishers' are the middle-men
AUTHORS are the people who would be screwed twice.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mr_mischief on Wednesday February 13 2019, @09:03PM (1 child)
All Google wanted was to aggregate the stories and show summaries or intros and collect some data and ad revenues before the click-through. Once users are on the publisher's site the publisher gets all the revenue generated from that point. Many news organizations balked at this and wanted better control of their thumbnails and short text snippets. So Apple gives them an alternative, but wants half the revenue for enabling the whole thing. I wonder if anyone will reevaluate the snippets-for-free aggregation model based on this development.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:08AM
The very next day they published a story about it, because their online subscriptions skyrocketed.
The Vancouver Columbian dead-tree edition is doing _really_ well because Vancouver is a far-more traditional community that in The Oregonian's Portland.
The Oregonian dead tree isn't completely abandoned, however it's been heavily cut back in favor of http://www.oregonlive.com/ [oregonlive.com]
But The Columbian dead tree is quite a respectable mid-size city paper, whereas its website sux rox.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Wednesday February 13 2019, @09:26PM (1 child)
Considering that a digital subscription to my local newspaper is $12 per month itself, I can't see how this would be viable. Especially with Apple taking half.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @10:53AM
I'm already paying $10 a month.
A news channel would be nice.
Thanks, Apple, for giving your competition a good idea.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday February 13 2019, @09:33PM
I don't give much of a second thought that on my Kindle Fire tablet there's always about 1/12th screen space taken up with a blurb for whatever is hot at the Washington Post, and I'm happily invited when I click it to subscribe to the Post. I just let it sit and ignore it.
I think Apple is just trying to find a way to match Amazon, but outsource the actual reporting part.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Thursday February 14 2019, @01:28AM
Presumably Apple is trying to sell the customers of its walled garden to the publishers. Those customers are potentially worth a lot if they are loyal to Apple's news app. (It will be interesting to see what happens with non-apple news apps...)
One question I have is - is the contract exclusive? Must the publishers stories be ONLY on Apple's news app or can they publish them both on this app and others?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:04AM
The best way to obtain customer data is to obtain it yourself, through direct product sales.
If someone bough QuickLetter from Working Software, quite likely they'd order Spellswell or even FindsWell from our quarterly
junk mailnewsletter.The tough part was growing our registered user list, so that we'd have their names and postal addresses. We never moved many products through retail stores or through mail order catalogs.
To grow our list, we'd "Rent Names" FROM OUR DIRECT COMPETITORS then "drop tests" of one hundred "pieces" each, testing lists from different software publishers, magazines and other Customer Data Collectors, as well as varying the wording, color and typeface of the text on the outside of the envelope, the cover letter text and the offer price.
Once we had a single test drop that produced a profit - typically just a dollar or two - we'd drop that same combo of text and the like for a thousand pieces.
Then ten thousand.
Our very largest _single_ drop was a quarter million pieces. That year we grossed three million.
Consider that Apple does not permit one to do that kind with thing through either the macOS or the iOS App Stores. I expect Google doesn't permit it through Play either.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]