Apple News now lets publishers of all sizes edit and deliver their stories in the Apple News format, improves statistics dashboard, and launches ad campaign
Emily Jane Fox / Vanity Fair :
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple News launched in mid-2015 as a Flipboard-style app with a rich media story format, killing Newsstand and promising publishers they keep revenue from ads they sell while taking a 70% cut of iAd inventory (the original announcement). By December it had added an editor-curated Top Stories tab and Comscore integration so publishers could get advertiser credit for their traffic (that update).
This March 2016 move completes the on-ramp: the Apple News Format is no longer limited to big launch partners — publishers of any size can edit and deliver stories in it — and a beefed-up statistics dashboard plus a consumer-facing ad campaign signal Apple is now pushing scale on both sides of the marketplace.
First-order effects
- Small and mid-size publishers gain direct access to the Apple News Format without bespoke production work, lowering the cost of distributing inside Apple's app.
- The improved statistics dashboard gives those same publishers the measurement data they need to sell Apple News inventory to advertisers, building on the earlier Comscore credit arrangement.
Second-order effects
- Apple's ad campaign grows reader attention inside the app, raising the stakes against rival aggregation surfaces like Flipboard and Facebook's instant-article products for publisher mindshare.
- As more publishers adopt the format, Apple gains leverage over how news is packaged and measured on iOS — a position it extends later by letting top publishers plug in their own ad tech such as Google's DoubleClick (the 2017 ad-tech concession) and by paying outlets like BuzzFeed directly for content (the BuzzFeed first-window deal).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news distribution consolidates around platform-owned formats where the platform controls the template, the analytics, and increasingly the monetization — shifting publishers from owning their presentation layer to optimizing within someone else's.
- The progression from open format access to direct content payments points toward Apple becoming a buyer as well as a distributor of journalism, a structural role that invites closer regulatory scrutiny of platform-publisher economics.
The trend: News consumption is migrating into platform-controlled formats where Apple and peers set the templates, own the measurement, and progressively take a hand in funding the content itself.