Publishers are wary of Apple News given the company's secretive culture, disdain for advertising and the fact that big traffic doesn't translate to more money
You can't blame publishers for being wary when a giant Silicon Valley tech platform comes to them promising big new audiences and (someday) a way to make money off them.
Context & Ripple Effects
The wariness Digiday documents is the latest beat in a three-year arc: publishers complained back in 2015 about underwhelming traffic and no real-time data from Apple News, and Apple responded in 2017 by letting top publishers serve ads through their own tech like Google's DoubleClick. Yet a month before this piece, outlets were still reporting little to no ad revenue despite huge traffic growth — so the DoubleClick concession fixed the plumbing, not the money.
What makes the timing sharp is what came next: within months Apple had signed many publishers to its news service on a 50% revenue split that sources said wouldn't satisfy major newspapers. Publishers are effectively being asked to choose between an ad channel that doesn't pay and a subscription bundle on Apple's terms — with the app's roughly 90 million regular readers, curated by algorithms plus about 30 Apple journalists, too big an audience to walk away from.
First-order effects
- Publishers must decide how much editorial and production effort to keep pouring into Apple News when the Slate reporting shows traffic there converts to little or no ad revenue — audience reach without direct income.
Second-order effects
- Apple has already been forced into concessions under this pressure — opening ad serving to publishers' own tools like DoubleClick — and the News+ bundle with its 50/50 split is the next attempt to give publishers a monetization story before they deprioritize the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news distribution consolidates around platform-controlled surfaces where reach is abundant but pricing power sits with the gatekeeper: publishers become suppliers to bundles whose splits they don't set, and reader relationships migrate from owned sites to apps like Apple's.
The trend: News publishing is drifting from owned-audience economics toward platform-distributed reach, where scale on someone else's surface substitutes for — rather than builds — direct revenue.