The revamped Apple News app has been rebuilt from the ground up and rolled out on Mac’s as well as the latest iPhones in order to drive more traffic than ever before to publishers.
And in a new article in Slate Magazine, it is succeeding on that particular metric. More and more people are reading stories on the app but there’s a downside – for the publishers.
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They are not making increased revenues from the extra viewers yet. The piece quotes “sources at several news outlets” that confirmed that their Apple News audience has multiplied this year, so much so that it is comparable to Facebook and Google now in terms of traffic sources.
They said: “At Slate page views on Apple News have roughly tripled since September 2017 and the app recently surpassed Facebook as a driver of readership.”
Money’s too tight to mention
Google and Facebook send readers directly to Slate or whichever publishers website while Apple News does not. It keeps publisher content within the Apple News app, which is relatively ad free. For the past two years Apple News had an exclusive partnership with NBC Universal to sell ads within Apple News and only recently has allowed Apple News to add support for Google ads.
Slate’s Senior Product Manager Chris Schieffer said that Slate makes virtually no money from Apple News. In fact, they estimated that they made more money from a single article that gets 50,000 page views on our own website than we have from the 54 million views our content has had on Apple News this year.
The article goes on to say that Apple is looking to change this system. In May it announced that publishers would be able to use Google’s DoubleClick to serve ads in Apple News. Apple has also recently started paying for some original content within the News app while reports suggest the company is planning to launch an all-in-one subscription service that would include both news and magazines.
Apple has delivered viewers for the publishers no doubt but has to balance the equation financially for them to make sure they don’t lose interest in the platform and gravitate somewhere more profitable.
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