Will Apple News finally generate meaningful revenue for publishers?
Will Apple News finally generate meaningful revenue for publishers?PLUS: A legendary sports journalist gets her due.Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button: Let’s jump into it… Will Apple News finally produce meaningful revenue for publishers?Axios reports that Apple News has entered into an exclusive ad partnership deal with Taboola:
Apple News has a pretty massive user base — on account of its integration into over a billion iOS devices — but it’s always underperformed from a monetization perspective, especially on its advertising side. This is mostly due to Apple’s long-held distaste for advertising. A few years ago it outsourced its ad sales to NBC, but I doubt much came of that arrangement. Taboola always gets a bad wrap — mostly because it’s allowed in low-quality advertisers that engage in clickbait ad arbitrage — but I’ve long thought it’s underrated as a native ad tool. Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I’ve advocated for the publishing industry to embrace self-service native advertising because it provides much better engagement than display ads, and Taboola is the most scalable platform that specializes in sponsored content. According to that Axios piece, the company is already generating $1.4 billion in annual revenue, and this association with Apple will likely supercharge its reach and sales. So what does this mean for the publishers that have partnered with Apple News? Hopefully it results in a more meaningful revenue share. Historically, publishers have mostly viewed the free version of Apple News as a marketing tool to drive readers back to their owned and operated websites so they can be monetized more effectively. But if Taboola does succeed at increasing the platform’s ad revenue, then publishers might find themselves with a new meaningful revenue source. And then there’s Apple News+ — the paid version that grants customers access to longform magazine content. Apple hasn’t broken out specific subscription numbers for the service, but anecdotal reporting indicates the product is continuing to grow and produce larger and larger payouts. It’s not inconceivable that Apple could emerge as the most important tech platform for the publishing industry. Conde Nast’s innovative ecommerce strategySeveral Conde Nast titles developed their own annual product awards, which they monetize with affiliate links. The brands who win these awards will then tout them in their own marketing:
Obviously, the ecommerce space has become extremely saturated in recent years as thousands of publishers moved in to snatch up the low hanging fruit. Conde Nast’s innovative approach allows it to differentiate its content from all the low-quality product roundups that every website is now pumping out. How AI is accelerating the production of content spamThe Verge published a good piece detailing how some of the largest media outlets in the world are licensing articles from a company that runs a massive AI spam operation:
I think what’s so maddening about this type of stuff is the brazen laziness of it. At the end of the day, what attracts people to AI-written content is it offers the possibility of scaling up an entire media operation without actually putting in the work. Never mind the threat it poses to human content creators; what frustrates me is that the internet is constantly clogged with shit because there will always be a subset of human beings who want to cut corners. The fact that these schemes almost always fail is beside the point, since there will always be a new wave of lazy shitheads to replace them. How Jared Newman built Cord Cutter Weekly, a TV streaming newsletter with 32,000 subscribersWhen Jared Newman launched his Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter back in 2016, the streaming TV market was much smaller than it is today, with most TV networks either not having their own streaming app or requiring a cable subscription to access it. But as it turned out, he timed his launch perfectly, as it was only a matter of years before virtually every Hollywood studio pivoted to streaming. Today, his newsletter has over 32,000 subscribers, and a spinoff newsletter that gives tech advice has also grown to 1,200 paying members. In a recent interview, he discussed his motivation for launching the newsletter, why his editor let him promote it at the end of his columns, and whether he ever wants to leave his freelance career entirely to just focus on growing his two newsletters:
The nostalgic resilience of MetafilterMetafilter just turned 25, and Wired reminisced over how it managed to reject the trappings of the modern web:
Metafilter wasn't just an OG blog, its community features were later replicated on much larger platforms like Reddit and Quora. But Metafilter itself never had ambitions for massive scale, hence why it still serves as a sort of time capsule for the 2000s internet. Writer-owned cooperatives provide an opportunity for laid-off journalistsBack in February, the public radio station WAMU abruptly shut down DCist, a local blog the station had acquired several years before. This week, several staffers who were laid off as a result of the closing launched their own media outlet:
The main difference between this new outlet and those other worker-owned cooperatives is that it’ll be operated as a non-profit — likely because the staff wants to avoid erecting paywalls to generate revenue. The nonprofit status will make it easier for them to solicit donations and also apply for larger grants. I’m a big fan of writer cooperatives, especially when they’re launched by laid-off journalists. Building a sustainable media business by yourself requires a lot of runway, but a group of writers working together can scale up an audience much more quickly. This new outlet, for instance, has already managed to raise $84,000 in donations in less than 24 hours after launch. That’s the kind of momentum you get when working as a team. A legendary sports journalist gets her dueThe Long Lead published a fantastic profile of one of the first women to break into prestige sports journalism:
I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcastOne of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets. In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:
Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. ) Want a daily dose of media industry news?I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix: You're currently a free subscriber to Simon Owens's Media Newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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