Apple News+ subscription growth blows away major media sites | Hacker News Reader

Apple News+ subscription growth blows away major media sites

cultofmac.com

23 pointsbookofjoe20 comments

I was initially excited by Apple News+. $13/month for access to a wide array of newspapers and magazines. Imagine my disappointment to learn that this paid "premium" service is plastered with ads. Adguard mostly blocks ads in Safari so it's no use in the News app. I wonder how much of this subscription growth is from bundling News+ into Apple One.

I remember picking up a newspaper recently and being surprised at the cost and the amount of ads. I’m usually very anti-advertisement for paid services, but Apple is following a long tradition here.

When it comes to news, I think NPR and APNews covers most bases. I might be missing out on some news nuance, because I guess I'm not a news junkie.

For your issue with the app, it reminded me of an axe I grind. Whenever possible, I use a bookmark to their website, even if it's mobile.

I think not enough people are challenging themselves to determine "Is the app better than the browser?".

Apps give a privileged and intimate container for that company to control and capture your experience for their brand. Apps let that company run more privileged code on your device than a website could.

I think as a society, we've been conditioned to those app icons over the last 15 years. "There's an app for that". Yeah, but there's a website for almost all of them, too. And I can at-least control how I view it, and if I'm allowed to block ads.

Use a dns proxy and https://github.com/froggeric/DNS-blocklists/blob/main/NoAppl...

You may also need to disable Private Relay

Were you specifically looking at the "News+" tab in the News app? As far as I can recall nothing in there should have ads -- WSJ has some annoying boxes asking you to subscribe with them that are quite close to ads, but they aren't 3rd party advertising at least. By default I think the app will take you to the "Today" tab, which presents recent news from News+ sources and ad-supported sources alike.

Apple definitely needs to do a better job communicating this, it's not at all obvious from the description of the News+ subscription.

I see ads on articles on the News+ tab. I’m canceling it before my free subscription ends. Very disappointed.

Summary of what "blows away" means:

- Apple News+ has seen a 9% increase in subscriptions in the US between 2020 and 2024, while other leading news outlets have only managed ~3% growth during the same period.

- Apple News+ subscription growth is about 4x faster than major news sites.

- The Apple News+ partnership program is becoming a lifeline for news websites losing revenue.

- Apple's growing user base is a key driver for the growth of Apple News+ subscriptions.

I was curious about giving it another shot, but the price has increased from $10/month to $13/month and even with the plan, you still get bombarded with ads -- at least during the free month trial.

Can anyone confirm ads after the trial ends and payments kick in?

I have apple one, which includes the news. Barely use it. There are ads, not that many. Over all, the ads are palatable. Think smaller box in middle of screen, unlike the full screen take over of websites without blockers. But definetly has ads.

Also the discovery isn’t great and some articles are available and some aren’t. You can share from paywall articles for eligible publishers and open in news, works a bit more than half the time for me.

I guess if you like traditional media then it’s great. Also includes magazines but so does your library.

Personally I find the notifications to be politically slanted occasionally but a good way to know what the next new thing is. That’s a personal opinion but it turns me off from using it.

It's a good deal. Apple One for the family includes the boosted versions of the various media apps (Music, TV, News, etc.) plus more storage. I would never pay for a sub to WSJ or The Times or Globe & Mail or LA Times, but they are all included in News+ plus many more specialty, long-form, and even some local outlets.

It's also encouraging that Apple actually pays participating publications real money, and (supposedly) without much additional effort. Quoting Semafor:

A spokesperson for Time said that Apple News has become “one of our most important partners and delivers 7-figures of revenue for TIME annually,” adding that the publication garnered 5 million unique visitors from Apple News last month. The revenue and audience numbers have been similar at major Condé Nast publications, including Wired and Vanity Fair.

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/19/2024/as-clicks-dry-up-...

Of course, Apple may change the terms, and these pubs don't "own the customer" if the gateway is controlled by Cupertino, but 7-figure revenue really helps these organizations stay afloat.

I just wish they didn't geoblock news and fitness off of Apple One.

I can read english just fine, give me the damn content.

I think it would be hard to argue the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. are near market saturation for their audience— especially compared to the much more relevantly new Apple News+.

Additionally, Apple News is not a media site, but a media aggregator. Apple News does not employe journalists to produce stories.

I’m not sure there’s much to be gleaned from growth rates (percents) alone here.

Something seems off with these numbers.

NYT digital subscribers at the end of Q1 were at 9.9M.

There are apparently about 140M iPhone users in the US at the moment. Even if we assume that all Apple users are iPhone users (no Mac-only or iPad-only Apple customers), that all NYT subscribers are American, and that only Apple users subscribe to the NYT, you'd still end up with just 7% of the Apple users having a NYT subscription. Not 17% like claimed here. Fix any of those very optimistic assumptions, and the number moves even further away from what's claimed here.

You run into similar problems trying to reason about the change from 2020 to 2024 instead of just the end state, or if looking at WP or WSJ instead of NYT. Basically, either the source is being misrepresented in the article, or the source was based on garbage data.

It's nice having access to specialty magazines like Edge, APC, PLAY etc and the newspaper coverage is nice (The Australian, WSJ). The various 'feed' topics work reasonably well. There are some problems:

1. The (MacOS) reader app is not great when it comes to text readability, it's still awkward zooming around (some mags are just PDFs). I always feel a bit claustrophobic when using it.

2. It would be nice to be able to rotate the view 90 degrees to show more of a page at once (see above).

3. It would be nice to lose the damn adds (I'm paying after all): it's usually horrible AI image crap.

I'm always on the fence though, the 'free' version isn't THAT bad and $20/month is on the high side.

I almost exclusively use Apple News+ for the audio stories, which are now also available in the Podcasts app. I love to read long form articles but finding time to read is challenging. Instead I listen to them while working out or commuting.

I like Apple News+ except for one glaring problem: I know of no way to clip stories and save them. There’s no way of saving a story to Obsidian, no way of printing to PDF/OneNote, no way to send to Readwise, no way really of archiving anything really.

As such, it’s more an infotainment service rather than a service for the serious news reader. This is one example where Apple’s walled garden does not work.

This reminds me of how annoying it is that Apple News+ can't be bundled at a lower tier of Apple One. It only comes bundled with the Premier level, at least in Canada.

I last used News+ around 4 months ago but at the time, one thing I found infuriating about a paid product is that I could not opt out of the Apple editorial-chosen content like I could all other sources or topics. If they chose to surface things I didn't want to see again, I was SOL, and they frequently did. The UI controls for that exact functionality (show me less like this, or block this source entirely) was present and effective against other aggregated content within the same app, but disabled on the stories they wanted to bless. That was what ultimately led me to unsubscribe, rather than missing features or content sources or other maturity concerns.

bypass paywalls clean aint bad either

Most ‘news’ is a trap; a form of entertainment masquerading as a healthy, responsible, conscientious activity. For many, an addiction!

Similar payoffs to second hand smoke; the primary consumer gets their jollies, but its byproducts cause suffering to those in the vicinity.

99.9% of ‘news’ can be known about well in advance (or dismissed as irrelevant) by deeply reading into, thinking about, and understanding history, economics and the sciences. 100% when quantum computing is able to predict the weather.

I agree with the general sentiment: news sucks. On the other hand I find myself disliking it not because it's so predictable, but because how shallow it all is given the complexity of the current systems. This plus the intractable nature of reducing the complexity of the world to a short enough sound bite to keep people engaged. If what you say is true, you should have decent alpha playing in financial markets.

Sure, good 'back testing' (or understanding of history, people, and economies) helps with some of the core behaviors at play, but the way the coin lands these days is much more interesting and somewhat random. There are rhymes, but much of the complexity we're dealing with is new and unprecedented.

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