Apple News+: Helpful or Hurtful?
- Galveston
- Mar 27, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 2, 2020
Yesterday, Apple held an event to show off some of their new services they will be offering later this year. One of the services announced was Apple News+. Apple wants to make it easier for their consumers to reach any and all news they are interested in. They feel that Apple News+ is the perfect venue for this. But is this the ideal situation for magazine and newspaper publishers to reach out and gain more readers? Or are they hammering the nail on their own coffins?
Apple News+ is a paid add-on to Apple News that will give you access to a library of about 300 magazines and a few major newspaper and digital publications. You would pay $9.99 a month for the service for not only yourself, but anyone else in your household. This is a very good price when you think of the size of the library you will have and that any member of your family can have their own magazine choices and preferences. I myself am not a big magazine reader and most news I get is from watching TV or online. But if you are a big fan of magazines this could be a great buy for you. Instead of paying $10 a month for your one magazine you normally prescribe to, you could pay the same price and get many more choices on top of your current magazine. Apple News+ will adapt to your reading experience helping to give you recommendations to other titles based on your current reads, animated covers, and easy navigation throughout the app. So, for the consumer this sounds like it could be a great buy. But if we delve deeper some cracks start to show.
While most of this sounds like great news for all parties around, it seems that there are some glaring issues. First, from a publisher's side, this could either help your business gain new viewers or hurt your own business. Say you have your magazine company and you are relatively small and unknown. This could be a great way to start and get more readers to know who you are. Now imagine your business is a little bigger or even one of the top magazines around. You give Apple your magazines to use in their new app and hope this will equate to more readers for you. Now you may get more readers overall but what does that do for you money wise? Instead of readers going to the source now to get your magazine on paper or even buy it digitally for let's say $100 a year, they now pay $120 for Apple News+ for a much wider selection. It has been said that Apple is looking to get about 50 percent of the revenue from this deal. You now have driven all of your viewers away from your own site to Apple and receive a hefty pay cut. Ultimately this could lead to the demise of some of these businesses and all the journalists and stories that could be told through their outlet. But the publishers aren't the only ones that could stand to be hurt by this.
Journalists and readers stand to get hurt from this new form of digital media. Apple's algorithm that is meant to be helpful to you, the reader, can also hurt your experience. This process can hide stories that may be of interest from you just because it doesn't fit what style you'd been recently reading. This hurts the journalists also who put the time and effort for their articles to never even see the light of day. Another issue with this is that many of the magazines and newspapers will not be full-fledged copies of the print issues. Because you can only fit so much content on a phone or tablet device, many things will be cut away from the entire piece. At the end of articles and magazines the app will also suggest other similar articles that are alike to what you've been reading currently. But this does not lead you to the entire magazine. It'll only lead you to that particular article. This hurts the entire publishing company because you may never see anything of that magazine. Only an article. The algorithm Apple will use could be the most helpful or hurtful part of the experience. Whether your magazine or article will be seen is almost up to chance.
"If I was an American broadcast network, I would have thought twice about giving all of my library to Netflix," said Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times comparing Apple News+ situation to publishers of other magazines and newspapers. "Even if Netflix offered you quite a lot of money... does it really make sense to help Netflix build a gigantic base of subscribers to the point where they could actually spend $9 billion a year making their own content and will pay me less and less for my library?" Apple News+ will likely not feature the New York Times as part of their subscription. He believes that there is a high chance of publishers losing control of their content and own product through this process.
So, is Apple News+ bad? Well that's up to you. I believe this to be a better investment if you are a big magazine reader. If you are looking for more news this may not be the best venue. If you are a heavy reader into certain newspapers they may offer, it may not be. Many of the newspapers will only offer parts of their content to their app, in an attempt to make sure they aren't taking too much from their own business. This ensures that they will possibly get more spotlight to their media without giving it all away to Apple. But for the publishers and companies going all in on Apple News+, it remains to be seen whether this will increase their business or ultimately begin the demise of it. Many websites have already had services similar to Apple News+. But with a company with such a reach it is sure to make a splash in the media community one way or another. The coming years will be very telling on whether or not it'll be more of the same or a new era for magazines and newspapers alike.
Here are a few websites that can give you some more information behind my blog:
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