Personally I'm very excited about News+. When News launched I was hoping it would become something like News+ eventually. I think this could be what saves good journalism, I like to get news from a spread of publications especially with different biases and the existing subscription contracts would make this impossibly expensive.
This. I don't have an answer to what could save quality Journalism. But $5 spread between hundreds of publication from Gossip Magazines to Fashion and Entertainments don't sounds too reassuring.
As a point of comparison, the music subscription services are spreading $7/month between thousands of different artists. That seems to be working extremely well. We’re something like ten years into music subscriptions, right? It seems possible to me that ten years of getting people used to paying for news subscriptions could leave journalism in a similar place as the music industry.
There is a long tail in Music where Music produced today will still get revenue 10 to 30 years down the road. Compared to News which requires constant updating. And most musician or artist have other source of income mainly from live performing and tours. There is also the return of Vinyl which I think will only continue to grow.
There are no such revenue stream from the News Subscription.
If 1 million people sign up to AN+ at $10 per month, that’s $10 million per month brought in, or $120 million per year. Apple takes $60 million of that, and 300 publishers divvy up the other $60 million, which if distributed equally would be $200K per year, per magaizine. Apple has stated that payment will correspond with performance, which Apple defines as “time spent,” which will probably heavily skew to the publications being featured on the front page of AN+. Publications that don’t use the enhanced format (which is roughly half of them, currently) will likely never appear on the front page, which means they’ll earn nada, and the revenue will be lopsided to the publications Apple promotes.
Everything hinges on how Apple defines “Time Spent” and how much that correlates with promotion on AN+’s front home screen.
I don’t have the time to go look at financial statements of music labels vs publishers, but my guess is that the written word is much cheaper to produce. After all, the talent is much cheaper. Are there magazine or newspaper writers making more than $250k/year? Probably not. But there are tons of musical acts with multi-million dollar deals. Also, while there are songs and albums that make money for a long time, the labels need fresh content in the same way that publishers need fresh content.
But, look, I’m not saying this is a home run. All I’m saying is that it’s not clear to me that this is doomed to failure. Might work, might not. We shall see.
What disappoints me about Apple News+ is the lack of good UI for long reads, which must surely be the point of including things like the New Yorker. You can save articles, but there's no good UI to queue up what to read and then read them later. I use Pocket for this sort of thing -- seems like a missed opportunity.
(Right now you can't even remove magazines after adding them. Really feels like a beta product.)
Full access to the nations leading magazines. New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, etc. I don’t care about those, personally, but they’re some of the best long form writing around.
All of these magazines are on the free version of Apple News, but I haven’t done a deep-dive into how much of their content is available, so I get it if the “full access” part is important to you. I do wonder how important this is to most people though.
I wonder too. The only reason I think this has any chance in hell of working is that I didn’t think anybody would ever use the non-plus version of News. But they do.
