Mike Peterson
Apple News has hit a new milestone of 125 million active monthly users, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during Thursday's earnings call for the second fiscal quarter of 2020.
That represents an increase of roughly 25 million active users for the news aggregation platform in the first quarter of the year.
The Cupertino tech giant last reported monthly users for Apple News at its Q1 2020 earnings call in January. At that time, the platform had more than 100 million users.
Apple CFO Luca Maestri also reported strong growth of 17% year-over-year across Apple's paid services, which helped drive revenue for the sector to $13.3 billion with gross margins at 65.4%. Several services set all-time records during the quarter.
The Apple News platform, which also includes the premium Apple News+ subscription service, was first launched on iOS 9 in 2015.
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Amber Neely
4 Comments
Not a surprise when you think about it. News platforms, like package delivery and video conferencing, are among the few areas of the economy seeing a growth spurt. Lots of news + lots of time => more demand => more $s.
I wonder how many are paid users?
After the free trial period for those who bought Apple products ends, we’ll see how many sign up.
The article is talking about Apple News, not really News+ (though subscriber numbers are included in the total). I would imagine the paid base is only a small percentage of that (similar to the number of paid YouTube subs, for the same reason).
But the point is that Apple News is a popular platform, and the reason is because it’s great! I read it several times a day, and subscribed to The Atlantic (outside of News+) because I was so impressed with the quality of the writing. If I had the time to read more magazines I would take out a News+ sub in a heartbeat.