Apple News isn't making as much money for publishers as promised

Apple’s News Plus program isn’t generating as much income as promised for news publishing companies, Business Insider revealed this week. Despite giving away Apple News Plus and snagging up subscribers left and right, the firm hasn’t been able to fulfil its promises made to publishing companies that signed up.

Business Insider reports:

Apple gave away Plus for free for the first month, and in its first two days, it reportedly had about 200,000 subscribers, which is about what Texture had. But three months in, publishing execs who spoke for this article said the subscription revenue they’d gotten from the service was underwhelming based on two months of data after the trial ended. Some publishers have called the revenue underwhelming One publishing exec said Apple projected publishers would get 10 times the revenue they made from Texture at the end of Apple News Plus’ first year. “It’s one-twentieth of what they said,” the exec said. “It isn’t coming true.” Other publishers said their subscription revenue from Plus was lower than or on a par with what they got on Texture, which was small as a subscription driver to begin with.

Apple has been working with companies to reduce user friction and better differentiate free and paid news content. Some would look for a means to get their magazine content more app-friendly rather than the PDF like layout it has now. Others still don’t think Apple is putting their full weight being Apple News +. Apple’s News program may indeed get better in the future, but all you can read news services have never bode well for publishing companies who are often at the mercy of the platform owner and rarely build relationships with their readers. They are simply one disposable source among others. This is as true from the point of view of a user as it is for Apple. For publishing firms, their entire goal is to produce content. For Apple and its News team, its a mere feature of their app. From the start, the balance was lopsided.

Source: Business Insider, Via: Macrumors