Mikey Campbell
While Apple has yet to reveal numbers for last week's Apple News+ launch, a report on Tuesday claims the service saw more than 200,000 people sign up for a trial subscription in its first 48 hours of availability.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, The New York Times reports the figure represents more users than Texture, the magazine app Apple acquired to build Apple News+, had at its peak.
Dubbed "Netflix for Magazines," Texture was purchased by Apple in 2018, sparking speculation that the tech giant would leverage the app's framework for a branded subscription news offering. Those guesses were rendered correct last week when Apple debuted Apple News+, a for-pay news service that presents users access to some 300 magazines for $9.99 per month.
In addition, Apple's news product includes the Los Angeles Times and limited access to the The Wall Street Journal, the latter considered a crown jewel in terms of newspaper content.
Notably absent from Apple News+ are major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times, but not for want of trying. According to a report this week, Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue frequently visited both publications prior to launch in attempts to strike an amicable deal.
The NYT has been particularly critical of Apple's bundle pricing, saying the product puts publications at risk of subscriber cannibalization for minimal financial gain. Last week, The Times CEO Mark Thompson cautioned against distributing first-party content through third-party services, and likened services like Apple News+ to Netflix.
"We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else," Thompson said. "We're also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix (blender) with everyone else's journalism."
Some outlets, like The New Yorker, are attempting to balance the tables by offering only a portion of their content on Apple News+, with full subscriptions purchased through their standalone platforms providing total access. The WSJ is taking a similar tack and provides Apple News+ users access to all business and financial news, searchable in the app, alongside a curated selection of general, political and sports stories.
According to today's report, Rupert Murdoch, who purchased the The Journal in 2007, was a key factor in its inclusion in Apple News+. Murdoch is looking to expand the paper's demographic beyond Wall Street types by presenting more general interest, sports and lifestyle coverage, the report said. Perhaps not coincidentally, articles from those sections will be highlighted on Apple's service.
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29 Comments
The jury is still out for me. There are several magazines available that I already subscribe to the print version. I just have to add up the print subscriptions to see if I’ll save any money. Then there are magazines I like but seem pricey to me. Those would include National Geographic and Scientific American, both of which are part of the News+ collection. Time will tell. It would seal the deal if Apple were to offer a discounted yearly subscription like they do Apple Music.
With the number of high quality magazines available I will definitely be signing up. The New Yorker, in particular, is chock full of some of the best writers in the world - bar none. The WaPo and NYT can suck it - we get enough free articles from them each month anyway. My main concern, being fully employed and all, is the amount of time I have to read it all.
Will the service be available in Australia? At the moment we have normal News not News+. I definitely will pay for the subs if that means I can get to access quality papers/magazines without paying extra for individual ones. Keeping up with >10 subs are no fun.
200,000 suckers and counting.....