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Publishers Chafe At Apple's Terms For 'Netflix For News' Subscription Service As It Demands a 50 Percent Revenue Cut (wsj.com)
Zorro shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Apple's plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant's proposed financial terms (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the situation, complicating an initiative that is part of the company's efforts to offset slowing iPhone sales. In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a "Netflix for news," would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said. The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple's streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses, the people said. Credit-card information and email addresses are crucial for news organizations that seek to build their own customer databases and market their products to readers. Digital subscriptions are powering growth at big publishers including the Times, whose basic monthly subscription costs $15, the Post, which charges $10, and the Journal, which charges $39. Some of those companies are skeptical about giving up too much control to Apple, or cannibalizing their existing subscriptions to sign up lower-revenue Apple users, according to people familiar with the matter.
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses, the people said. Credit-card information and email addresses are crucial for news organizations that seek to build their own customer databases and market their products to readers. Digital subscriptions are powering growth at big publishers including the Times, whose basic monthly subscription costs $15, the Post, which charges $10, and the Journal, which charges $39. Some of those companies are skeptical about giving up too much control to Apple, or cannibalizing their existing subscriptions to sign up lower-revenue Apple users, according to people familiar with the matter.
Why would we want "Netflix for news"?
Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are already our "news and chill."
Apple's plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant's proposed financial terms (Warning: source may be paywalled)
For some reason that just made me laugh.
I think 50% is absurdly high, as a percentage for Apple.
But on the other hand, m as a consumer I cannot imagine a price above $0 I would be willing to pay for a "Netflix of News". I already place so little value on a wide range of news I can get for free, what value could this service possibly have? The only thing I can maybe see people getting this would before a slight reduction in the price of a WSJ and NYT together, maybe enough people want to do that Apple's service will be viable.
But I doubt it... since Apple News today is already free and I hardly use it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People pay for that crap?
This is going to be the next National Enquirer with way additional revenue is divideded. There is way to much effort to monetize âoenewsâ vs reporting on actual news. ðYY
Back in the paper days we used to collect this information and sell it to third parties unbeknownst to subscribers. Also, we don't recognize the irony in writing about Facebook and privacy.
The existing web news business is finished anyway, the ad revenue is at junk levels, the ads are junk, and the amount of syndicated content that comes entirely from Reuters or AP is what makes up the bulk of most news papers.
With that said, the subscription model is perfect, and it should be the model that all existing "free" content operates under as ads no longer keep food on the table. Free news will never go away, but it will become secondhand news.
And before some nitwit wonders why newspapers would have your card number. The BIN (first 6 digits) and last 4 digits is ALWAYS retained by any site you use your card on except when you use Paypal. This is why Paypal was a good thing until they started clamping down on fraud and sweeping a lot of "high risk" content away with it.
To which I'll respond with "fuck them" if they need it, because if they need it, they were selling you nothing but ads.
When the day comes that human citizens no longer have private property and we must redirect the fruits of all our labor to the 5 big corporations of the world, will there be a way to reroute the contents of my bunghole to these companies for extra digital fiefs? Is this something that will be a part of the Apple ecosystem?
Welcome to the city.
50% to set up shop. Protected by the city walls.
Free speech is a sin.
Curation of news can happen.
No Taiwan flag. No Tiananmen square.
Nothing that is offensive to a Communist party.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...just like Google. This sounds like butthurt, same as the dinosaur news publications that want Google to cut them a check for daring the link to their stories....despite Google brining them an audience...
provide all the news I could ever care to consume.
I actually go out of my way to avoid any news not related to upcoming severe weather events and some sportsball information.
Don't get it. I can read all day. I subscribe to two major papers. Why pay Apple ?
Isn't that a bit dodgy?
Apple shouldn't even be storing the full credit card number. They should only have a token given to them by their payment provider, that only they can use.
I can understand them wanting email addresses of the people reading their content, purely for matching data. It would be better if Apple provided some kind of email address token service, where the content providers give apple their list of email addresses they want to match, Apple responds with tokens for each address and then they can used that token for analytics. If they didn't have someone's email address before, they don't deserve it until that person willingly gives it to them.
I doubt Apple will want to put in their privacy policy they'll share your personally identifiable information with 3rd parties.
Who is behind "Smart News"? They offer news free on Android, but don't say what news they are selecting or who is doing it.
I'd pay to watch you shit on Trump. Then watch him shit in AOC's mouth. That is politics.
I foresee a future where people are paid to view news. This is completely reasonable since news stopped being about informing people and became more about pushing an agenda. So it's pay me to occupy my brain with your viewpoint. Like a billboard.
Requiem for the American Dream
The two dominant motivations for every subscription service from cable TV to apps like this.
If we ignore for the moment the issue of Apple trying to get too big a piece of the revenue pie, the Netflix-for-news idea itself is actually rather good.
I read a lot of news, and I'd prefer to pay a reasonable amount of money and get quality content, over paying no money and getting ad-plastered click-bait.
The problem is that there are hundreds of newspapers out there, and my news feeds (Google News and Apple News) include articles from all of them, and most of them want me to sign up to pay them a small amount of money a week -- but I really don't want to set up a paying relationship with dozens or hundreds of different newspapers whose future articles I may or may not actually read. Therefore (with a few exceptions) I generally just ignore their pleas, and they are left to survive on advertising income alone, while I am often barraged by annoying advertisements that I'd prefer not to see.
So having a single place to send money, in return for quality content from a variety of sources, seems like a good idea. I'm not sure I'd trust Apple to be that single place, given their proto-monopolistic mindset, although their Apple News app is quite good IMO.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I don't see how Apple is going to pull off getting the valuable news sites onto their "Netflix for news' service. Since the WSJ now charges $39 per month, and Apple wants to charge only $10 for a blanket service, I don't see the WSJ going for it, unless Apple pays them a fortune up front.
They're a boutique "name" that stupid people pay hyper-inflated prices for and receive no real value from.
They aren't innovating anything here. They're just relying on "We're Apple! Fat-Margins-R-Us".
Let them crash and burn on this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Is still better than 100 percent of nothing.
It's been a while since I looked, but I could get a well written paper physical copy in the past via a paperboy, for cheaper than they're charging now for a bunch of click bait articles..
Right now I just stop visiting any site that throws up a paywall. Your content isn't worth the trouble. Toss me an add and let me see the content.
It annoys me, but I do understand the sites that offer a paid version, but I can say no and get an add version. I know it costs money, I think that's a fair amount of annoy me but get their message across.
Apple does not much, and for the most part focus the one ecosystem to ripp of hard working developers. Already for a lone developer 30% less income is a lot, for a larger team making quite some sales 30% is a quite hefty amount in the books. 50% is just a blatant rippof. Compensating for their failing, peak bug product lines. In my opinion 10% would be fair. And also open the market so vendors and users can choose alternative distribution models, ..! (Yes, currently migrating to Android: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)
The days when Apple was in a position to dictate terms is gone, or going away fast.
'Netflix for news' does sound fancy, but, speaking for myself, I read/check a handful of reliable outlets (that I then compare to filter opinions and get the facts). So I fire up the web browser, visit website A, then website B, then website C... I don't see how a 'netflix for news' is going to be of any interest.
May be there are people out there that read so many newspapers that having them streamed through one place is worth it. But I keep struggling to spot where the need is.
Publishers should learn to code
... but if they did, they could make a fortune by charging a penny for a "fakenews" downvote and the same for an upvote. Of course it would incentivize troll wars, but what else is new?
What are the chances that someone just made that 50% up so that they can claim later that Apple was forced to back down to a more reasonable figure?
close to 0% for most people, moderate to high for Apple fanboys.
I subscribe to two major papers.
When a friend shares with you a link to an article from a paper other than those two, and you go to read it, the paper's publisher is likely to tell you that your subscription is no good there.
Publishers should learn to code their own pay wall sites.
The problem with each publisher coding its own paywall comes when I want to read only one article or a handful of articles from a given publisher. Because of the roughly 0.30 USD transaction fee that credit card processors charge on top of their 3% cut, news publishers are unlikely to offer articles a la carte.[1] Instead, each publication requires readers to purchase a month's subscription to that publication or perhaps a pack of 100 page views from that publication. But once I've read the three articles that interest me, I can't resell the other 97 page views or 29 days of a subscription or use them with a different publication.
[1] I'm referring to news and news-based editorial, not closed-access academic journals, which tend to charge tens of dollars for a copy of a single article.
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses
Boo-fucking-hoo
Tim Cook's ' More for Less' gangster strategy at its simplest reflects a globalist's mindspeak from an abundance of eyeballs it thinks it owns; hence the offer publishers can't refuse giving up ½ of their revenue.
The monopoly is eyeballs not context or distribution!
Your content isn't worth the trouble. Toss me an add and let me see the content.
Some sites don't even toss me an ad. They toss me the URL of a third-party proprietary computer program written in JavaScript that surveils my browsing history across multiple websites and uses the battery life and Internet bandwidth that I pay for to choose an ad from one of a dozen or more ad networks. And if I say no to proprietary software or no to surveillance, these sites are incapable of falling back to a publisher-hosted ad like those seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs because interest-based ads pay three times the CPM.