Slate - The world's most valuable company is wooing the media with a human touch and a huge audience. One thing it hasn't delivered: money.
tldr - Apple News using human curation is better than the chaos of clickbait trash on Facebook, but this human interaction (e.g. slack channels) might be too skewed towards major news outlets. Restrictive ad management and keeping users in the Apple News app itself also means most sources are not seeing increased revenue despite increased views / traffic. The increased visits may lead to news sources that offer subscription services getting increased revenue that way, though.
Even shorter tldr - fuk u Apple release the News app in more than three countries.
Since 2017, scandals involving fake news, Russian electoral interference, and user privacy have sullied the social network's reputation. Facebook has responded to the criticism partly by trying to exert more control over what stories appear in users' feeds—but also partly by simply showing them less news. For many publishers (though certainly not all), traffic from Facebook has nosedived.
This change in the landscape has left both readers and publishers casting about for new platforms. Google, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, and Flipboard are among those that have sought to fill the vacuum left by Facebook's pullback—each bringing its own set of incentives for publishers who want to reach more readers. But one platform in particular has exploded as a news source in the past year, and it promises an antidote to some of the poisonous dynamics that Facebook had set in motion. That platform is Apple News.
Launched to rather tepid fanfare three years ago, Apple's mobile news app has recently surged in popularity and influence, if publishers' traffic figures are any indication. Sources at several news outlets say they've seen their audience on Apple News multiply in 2018 alone. Some now say it has become one of their top traffic sources, alongside Facebook and Google. At Slate, which disclosed its data for this story, page views on Apple News have roughly tripled since September 2017, and the app recently surpassed Facebook as a driver of readership.
Conversations with social media consultants and people who work in audience development at major publications, along with recent reports by other outlets, suggest Slate is not an outlier—which is why many news organizations are now making Apple News an important part of their strategy to reach as large an audience as possible.
There is, of course, a catch. Whereas Facebook sent hordes of readers from its news feed to publishers' websites, Apple tends to keep them inside its app. And so far, publishers have found that's not a lucrative place to be. Although it's been two years since Apple partnered with NBCUniversal to sell ads inside the app, several sources at media outlets told me that they're seeing little to no ad revenue from Apple News.
The problem, publishers say, is that Apple doesn't sell many ads within the app—not nearly as many as you'd find on most websites—and it doesn't make it particularly easy for publishers to sell their own. Apple News doesn't support some of the common ad formats or systems that dominate ad sales on the web, and not all media companies find it worthwhile to develop and sell custom ads just for Apple News. (Those that do can keep all the revenue or they can let Apple sell them, in which case Apple takes a 30 percent cut.) As Matt Karolian, the Boston Globe's director of new initiatives, told me, "The juice ain't worth the squeeze."
So why would an industry largely sustained by ads go in on a platform that, thus far, does not pay? Because Apple News may represent a saner way of discovering the news than Facebook. And because there are some indirect ways in which publishers believe the app's massive audience will make them money.
Because Apple both tightly controls the platform and closely guards its data, there are no definitive industrywide figures on Apple News traffic. But the company does share some data with its media partners. And that data is as encouraging as the data coming out of Facebook is dispiriting. The Information reported in February that there were days when Vox got half of its daily traffic from Apple News. Business Insider reported in May that Vice's Apple News traffichad more than doubled in the past year. Digiday reported in January that ABC News had more than 400,000 people signed up for its alerts on Apple News.
Mother Jones, meanwhile, has seen a 400 percent leap in Apple News audience since last September, said Ben Dreyfuss, its editorial director for growth and strategy. The spike began in the first few months of 2018, he added, when readership doubled in consecutive months. That kind of growth would grab media companies' attention no matter where it was coming from. No wonder a Digiday poll in February found that more media executives were prioritizing Apple News over other platforms.
The audience isn't the only thing that excites publishers. Unlike Facebook, Apple News employs humans to choose its top stories and takes cues from editors at the news organizations with which it partners. The result is a platform that looks more like an online magazine than an algorithmically generated feed—one where editorial judgments about news value tend to trump viral clickbait, and breaking news and original features outrank partisan hot takes. By regularly delivering push notifications to users from publications they've signaled interest in, the app gives editors a direct line to readers' phones. It is, in many ways, the anti-Facebook that the mainstream news media (and some of its savvier consumers) have been craving.
"If you were to sit down with publishers and ask them what they would want to see in a multi-source news app, it would look probably pretty much identical to Apple News," said Karolian, who has worked to develop the Globe's presence on the platform.
How Apple News decides what stories to feature in each user's app is a bit murky. Several sources confirmed to Slate a February report from the Information that Apple has set up Slack channels in which editors at major publications can pitch stories for it to feature. BBC News has one, as does Slate. Apple News also sometimes rewrites headlines on the articles it picks for its featured sections, and uses its Slack channels to make sure those changes are accurate. Sources at two midsize publications said they do not have access to a Slack channel with Apple News, though one said he corresponds occasionally with the app's editors via email.
The audience growth and the human editing is the good news for publishers. And so far, that seems to outweigh their disappointment in the revenue. The reason is that there may be other ways to leverage the Apple News readership.
Slate's Schieffer told me that the magazine uses its Apple News ad slots on house ads promoting its own podcasts, and hopes to use the app in the future to drive sign-ups for its Slate Plus membership program. That's a model that does appear to hold some promise: The Washington Post told the Information earlier this year that it was gaining hundreds of paying subscribers through Apple News each day. And Apple reportedly plans to eventually incorporate Texture into its own premium subscription service—like Apple Music, but for news.* (Texture, whose service has been glossed as "Netflix for magazines," gives users access to digitized versions of dozens of magazines for a single monthly subscription.)
News organizations are probably right to cheer a platform that seems to eschew the worst tendencies of the social media age. But if they want to be sustained by Apple News, they better hope it starts getting serious about ad sales soon—or that other benefits, like a boost in subscriptions, go from theoretical to concrete. If the Facebook era taught us anything, it's that bad habits are always only so far away.
tldr - Apple News using human curation is better than the chaos of clickbait trash on Facebook, but this human interaction (e.g. slack channels) might be too skewed towards major news outlets. Restrictive ad management and keeping users in the Apple News app itself also means most sources are not seeing increased revenue despite increased views / traffic. The increased visits may lead to news sources that offer subscription services getting increased revenue that way, though.
Even shorter tldr - fuk u Apple release the News app in more than three countries.
