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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?
(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.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.