How to Save Apple News+
Like a trillion $ company needs more revenue
Apple News+ launched three months ago, and it’s essentially a relaunch of Texture, which Apple acquired in 2018. The recent headlines for Apple News isn’t good: “Apple is tweaking its 3-month-old news subscription bundle, Apple News Plus, after it got off to a slow start” and “Apple News is going back to the drawing board with its 3-month-old Apple News Plus after a slow start for the news subscription bundle.”
Apple News subscribers get access to more than 300 publications, and while Apple gave away News for free for the first month, in its first two days it reportedly only had about 200,000 subscribers — the same number of subs Texture had when Apple acquired it. Publishing execs said Apple projected 10x the revenue they had made from Texture, but in reality “it’s one twentieth of what they said … it isn’t coming true.” Other publishers confirmed that their revenue from Apple News was lower than or equal to their Texture revenue.
Yikes. So what happened?
Obviously Apple is attempting to leverage its handset scale. And obviously they don’t know how to deal with this kind of content.
But first, a few side observations. One report noted that a job for the “Apple News marketing lead wasn’t posted until May 8, two weeks after the product launched, and was still open as of June 28.” This reminds me of IBM’s Watson Education, which didn’t hire a marketing lead until four months after its first product launched in 2016. (Watson Education closed in 2018.)
Optimists made comparisons to Apple Music, which launched back in 2015 and surpassed Spotify in the US in early 2019. One publishing exec responded to such optimism with “No one wants all-you-can-eat magazine content.”
It’s Not About the Content
Apple News probably thinks it’s in the content distribution industry. Well, they’re wrong.
Pure content distribution is a niche market. It always has been. A book that sells 50,000 copies will be on best-seller lists. I tell authors my last book sold about 10,000 copies and they’re very impressed. Now compare that to music or movies — selling 10,000 copies or tickets would be a financial disaster.
So what’s the difference? Movies and music are communal and entertainment experiences. The person who sits alone watching movies all day, day after day, has mental problems. The key to movies and music and television is to engage with other people. In the end, it’s not about the content; it’s about the content creating community (just take a look at how animated various music communities are). Books do that on some level — reading groups, booktubers, etc — but it’s quite limited compared to how movies, television and music create communities (just compare the size of those communities on Reddit to the size of the book communities or compare music festival attendance to book festival attendance).
Right now, the most read article on the Wall Street Journal (which is on Apple News) is “Apple Moves Mac Pro Production to China.” Right now, Apple has about six threads on Reddit’s most popular 500, the top thread is about Apple maps being used by DuckDuckGo. None of them are about Mac Pro Production. That said, that article in WSJ.com has over 300 comments.
The point is that pure content distribution — information transfer — is a niche market. The big market isn’t the thing itself but people talking about the thing. Failing to recognize that is why so much ed-tech fails. This is why MOOCs fail. This is why newspapers, historically, have never been good businesses (newspapers, like magazines, are more often vanity projects than solid business investments). The market for pure content distribution — knowledge transfer — is small. It always has been. Successful (from a business perspective) content distribution projects are really engagement projects — those who know this, build empires (e.g. Facebook). Those who don’t need to find a vain billionaire (Jeff Bezos). (Fun fact: the Washington Post had been previously owned by another vain billionaire, Eugene Meyer, and has been a hobby of billionaires since the 1920s.)
How to Save Apple News Plus
The name — Apple News Plus — gives away one problem; this all seems like an uninspired big-corp boondoggle. Apple thought this would be easy just because they’re Apple. We’ve all seen that show. It doesn’t end well.
If Apple doesn’t build community and experience around Apple News, then it will fail. If the premise is that people want to suck on the end of an information fire hose, then it will fail. Sure, some people will want the information fire hose, but just compare the number of people who read ‘serious’ books or watch ‘serious’ YouTube channels compared to Twilight or channels of kittens juggling. The success of Apple News depends on building an entertainment and experience platform that generates community.
Millennials Invented Nothing
We’re told that millennials value experience — they don’t just want the product, especially something that’s a passive digital product. Well, that sounds like what Apple is trying to sell.
But here’s the thing: it was always about the experience. The early 2000s were an aberration when we amused ourselves with our ability to zap mass content instantly. But before that, even when television reigned, it was about watching television with your family and talking about it with your friends or going to the movies with your friends and talking about it afterward. There should be nothing weird about going to the movies alone … but there is. This is an even more explicit mistake made in education in which we thought that all we had to do was zap information into kids’ brains. People want to see movies and watch television with other people, and they want to talk about it.
Massively scalable content is always about the experience and the community it generates. The key to any community is the other people it attracts. The leverage of any content is to bring together like-minded people and have them discover meaning among themselves. Achieving that is how content distribution scales.
Pure content distribution is always a niche market. Recent examples:
Center for American Progress Puts ThinkProgress Up for Sale. https://www.thedailybeast.com/center-for-american-progress-puts-think-progress-up-for-sale
Millennial Conservative Website IJR Lays Off Staff as it Transitions to a Nonprofit. https://www.mediaite.com/news/exclusive-millennial-conservative-website-ijr-lays-off-staff-as-it-transitions-to-a-nonprofit/
About Nathan Allen
Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM Watson. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….
