Apple offers past Apple News+ subscribers another free month

Apple is offering a free month of service to users who tried Apple News+ but have since canceled their subscriptions.

The $9.99-a-month Apple News subscription service, which offers users a range of magazines and premium media content, first launched in March 2019. The service is said to be struggling in terms of gaining new customers while at the same time appeasing participating publishers.

It now appears that Apple is launching a new promotion that will let users who have previously canceled their Apple News+ subscriptions get another month for free. The offer was spotted by 9to5Mac.

The promotion comes ahead of a potential launch of an Apple News+ audio component, which was first rumored in May and corroborated by icons found in an iOS 13.5.5 beta.

In late June, The New York Times announced that it would be pulling out of Apple News due to the fact that the platform provided "little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business."

At its latest earnings call, Apple announced that Apple News has 125 million overall users — which includes both the free standard component of the app and the Apple News+ subscription.

Apple in June also sent out emails to past Apple Arcade subscribers inviting them back for another free month. Those emails came just before a report of Apple Arcade shifting its strategy to focus on games with higher "engagement."

19 Comments

SpamSandwich 32917 comments · 19 Years

About 4 years ago

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

flydog 1140 comments · 14 Years

SpamSandwich said:

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

Your free forum post proves that.

Rayz2016 6957 comments · 8 Years

flydog said:

SpamSandwich said:

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

Your free forum post proves that.

Zing!

However I think one of the problems is local content. Everything seems geared towards the American market.

fred1 1133 comments · 11 Years

Please, Apple, stick to what you do well: hardware and software. Leave news and movies to the experts. If you want more revenue, make devices that make us want to buy them, like in the old days.

Marvin 15336 comments · 18 Years

fred1 said:

Please, Apple, stick to what you do well: hardware and software. Leave news and movies to the experts. If you want more revenue, make devices that make us want to buy them, like in the old days.

Apple is neither authoring news nor producing movies, they are providing a platform for them, just as they have done for software and music. Convenient services make ecosystems nicer to use. Apple News has 125 million users, that's a huge userbase. It's hard getting a lot of people to pay for digital news when so much news is available for free. Most popular publications like New York Times and Wall Street Journal have around 2-3 million digital subscribers, which is very small compared to 125 million overall users:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/media/new-york-times-q1-2020-earnings/index.html
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-wall-street-journal-joins-the-new-york-times-in-the-2-million-digital-subscriber-club/

I think Apple's branding for this service is underselling the most appealing aspect, which is magazines. News sounds like it's just newspaper content. The parts listed in the box is what comes extra with the subscription:

People love the free part but the extras with the paid part can't be offering enough value to justify $10/month. There have been some issues described with it like not getting full access to everything, some of the content quality not being optimized for digital displays, still showing ads:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-03-26-apple-news-plus-hands-on.html

If I was unfamiliar with Apple News+ and I saw an ad with that brand, there's no way I'd know that magazines like Men's Health, National Geographic, fashion magazines, gaming magazines were in there. But also, magazines are best viewed on platforms with big displays, that's iPad and Mac users.

Maybe they can offer cheaper subscription tiers where people choose the magazines they want to subscribe to like 5 magazines for $2.99/month, 20 magazines for $4.99/month, all magazines for $9.99/month. Then I think they could do with putting out some ads that let people know that some really popular magazines are in there. There's a lot of ways they can boost that service with it being digital like health magazines can have celebrity workouts and diets linking with apps like the fitness trackers and cooking/shopping apps. Fashion magazines can link with product sites. Music magazines can have audio tracks from musicians that can be added to iTunes libraries. Then celebrities can be recommending the service.