Report: multiple publishers have been unimpressed with revenue from Apple News+; one said revenue has been one twentieth of what Apple said it would be
Juli Clover / MacRumors : Source: Business Insider .
Context & Ripple Effects
When Apple signed publishers to News+ ahead of launch, the deal was a 50% revenue split that Recode reported would likely not satisfy major newspapers — and several signed anyway. Early reviews flagged structural problems beyond money: a Texture-derived UX that buried newspaper and digital-news content (Nieman Lab) and messy news delivery overall (The Verge).
This report is the first hard revenue reckoning with those warnings: multiple publishers say News+ income has disappointed, with one pegging it at one-twentieth of what Apple projected. It lands alongside TechCrunch's launch-week argument that the bundle could decimate publisher revenue and disrupt reader relationships rather than rescue outlets.
First-order effects
- Publishers that accepted the 50/50 split are earning a fraction of Apple's projections from News+, validating their pre-launch skepticism about the economics.
- Apple's recruiting pitch to the major newspapers that held out weakens considerably — the flagship bundle no longer has a credible revenue story to sell them.
Second-order effects
- Apple's response pattern points toward tighter control rather than better terms: by 2020, sources said Apple forced News+ readers into its app instead of publisher sites without telling partners, deepening the reader-relationship disruption critics predicted at launch.
- Rival platforms courting publishers for subscription bundles now face partners armed with this data, pushing them toward richer splits or per-subscriber attribution to close deals.
Third-order effects
- If bundle revenue keeps undershooting, premium publishers will rationally withhold their best journalism from platform bundles and defend direct subscriptions, leaving such services stocked with commodity magazine content.
- The longer-term structure is distribution platforms capturing the customer relationship while content suppliers become interchangeable — the outcome TechCrunch warned of at launch, now with revenue numbers attached.
The trend: Platform-operated content bundles are shifting value from publishers to whoever owns the distribution layer, and News+'s shortfall is an early data point in publishers relearning that lesson.