Mike Wuerthele
As part of folding the Texture "Netflix for magazines" service into its own products, Apple appears poised to fire up a premium subscription offering integrating curated news to continue to grow services revenue.
Following Apple's acquisition of Texture, the company allegedly cut about 20 employees, likely due to redundancy with Apple's own services. This is reportedly part of a larger effort to bolster Apple News, with an integrated offering expecting to launch within the next year.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, Bloomberg claims that, as Texture does now, a "slice of the subscription revenue" will go to magazine publishers that are included in the program.
Tuesday's report by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg isn't exactly revelatory, and doesn't add anything more than is already known about the initiative other than the layoffs. Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue spoke about the Texture acquisition at the SXSW "Media Curation, and Why it Matters" session, talking about how important curating news was to Apple, and how Texture would help Apple accomplish its goals — making it very clear what Apple had in mind.
"We're excited Texture will join Apple, along with an impressive catalog of magazines from many of the world's leading publishers." Cue said in a statement about the buy. "We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users."
"We want the best articles," Cue said at the SXSW event regarding the company's plans for Texture. "We want them to look amazing and we want them to be from trusted sources."
The Texture app is free, with two tiers of subscription. A $9.99 per month tier gives a choice from over 200 monthly titles, with a $14.99 giving you the monthly titles, plus some weekly ones, like People, Entertainment Weekly, Time and others.
The terms of the deal are not known. Texture never disclosed its valuation.
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11 Comments
And if that comes with an agent to aggregate news stories and save me from click bait and rereading 96 percent repetitions to find the new and significant, I say big “yes”. Even if it cost more.
...I used this for some time (before Apple ownership) and cancelled due to the lack of a desktop mac option. The Windows desktop app exhibited remarkable potential, especially on a cinema display in portrait mode, to me being better than a physical magazine in many ways - larger, brighter, multimedia capable, screen shot-able to send references to clients, etc... If Apple can offer a mac desktop version that was less buggy (Windows had size limits) it would lure me back...
"...beautifully designed and...."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, except beautiful design is never on the list or a concern if you're all about "quality journalism." It's the latter that you want to build on as a reliable service, not how pretty you think it should look.
Oh, and by the way, is this not version 3 of Apple's forays into dealing with news? First it was the news app, now it's Apple News, now it's this.
I also can't want to see how many techie boyz will insist that "I'd pay may more for..." which is always a lie among such a cheap crowd that often disparages journalism and loves to talk about its impending, deserved death. Oh look, there it is.
I'd pay to not have access to these mags ;-)