Publishers Chafe At Apple's Terms For 'Netflix For News' Subscription Service As It Demands a 50 Percent Revenue Cut (wsj.com) 102
Zorro shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Apple's plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant's proposed financial terms (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the situation, complicating an initiative that is part of the company's efforts to offset slowing iPhone sales. In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a "Netflix for news," would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said. The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple's streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses, the people said. Credit-card information and email addresses are crucial for news organizations that seek to build their own customer databases and market their products to readers. Digital subscriptions are powering growth at big publishers including the Times, whose basic monthly subscription costs $15, the Post, which charges $10, and the Journal, which charges $39. Some of those companies are skeptical about giving up too much control to Apple, or cannibalizing their existing subscriptions to sign up lower-revenue Apple users, according to people familiar with the matter.
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses, the people said. Credit-card information and email addresses are crucial for news organizations that seek to build their own customer databases and market their products to readers. Digital subscriptions are powering growth at big publishers including the Times, whose basic monthly subscription costs $15, the Post, which charges $10, and the Journal, which charges $39. Some of those companies are skeptical about giving up too much control to Apple, or cannibalizing their existing subscriptions to sign up lower-revenue Apple users, according to people familiar with the matter.
users too... (Score:1)
Why would we want "Netflix for news"?
Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are already our "news and chill."
Re: users too... (Score:1)
All they do is whine about Trump 24/7. Sad!
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All of mass media is doing the same. Can't get the news any more. It's all editorial, without the disclaimer. Oh well, it's what people want.
Re: users too... (Score:1, Troll)
"Oh well, it's what the oligarchs want."
FTFY
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I haven't watched American "news" in over a decade. Journalistic integrity has flown the coop. I don't agree with much, but Trump is right about "fake news" - only he doesn't go far enough. It is almost ALL fake these days.
The "news" doesn't report facts any longer; it sensationalises events.
I don't want their "news". I want facts and honest analysis. I am not apathetic; I am disenfranchised. Yet somehow these cunts persist.
I'm afraid I have to agree more with GP's oligarch statement.
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Trump is qualified to be President by the only criterion that exists.
Re:users too... (Score:4, Informative)
The Dutch outfit *The Correspondent* has developed a subscription news service -- no advertisers, no eyeball selling to third parties. They get 100% of their revenue from their readers. And they just finished a successful crowdfunding campaign to start up in the US.
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I foresee a future where people are paid to view news. This is completely reasonable since news stopped being about informing people and became more about pushing an agenda. So it's pay me to occupy my brain with your viewpoint. Like a billboard.
How ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant's proposed financial terms (Warning: source may be paywalled)
For some reason that just made me laugh.
I think 50% is absurdly high, as a percentage for Apple.
But on the other hand, m as a consumer I cannot imagine a price above $0 I would be willing to pay for a "Netflix of News". I already place so little value on a wide range of news I can get for free, what value could this service possibly have? The only thing I can maybe see people getting this would before a slight reduction in the price of a WSJ and NYT together, maybe enough people want to do that Apple's service will be viable.
But I doubt it... since Apple News today is already free and I hardly use it.
Re:How ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, what? I mean, all the news sources have to do is hire and pay the staff, cover travel and investigation costs, spend months investigating, write, edit, vet and generate the content, format it, deliver it. Apple has the heavy lifting of putting that news into a supersized RSS feed. CLEARLY they are being generous with the news sources, if anything!
/sarc
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Well, look at is this way, if you provide a free news subscription and make you money in another way, 50% of nuthin is nuthin. Personally outside of specialised news, general news is simply not worth subscribing too in terms of paying for it. Paying is a real lock in, they own your news now, you are bound to watch what you are paying for, rather than what you do not and will you choose to believe what you pay for or will you reason out something else based upon a broad spread of news.
How news of public imp
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This service is the liberal side of Apple desperately trying to get people to buy into (in all sense of the term) traditional news sources again.
Kind of like a defibrillator for a stroke victim. Only the victim has also drowned and the person doing the administering will get quite the shock as well trying to revive them.
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The Guardian has managed to make a voluntary donation model work for them. The site is free with some ads, or you can donate. I was actually surprised that it worked, but they are now doing pretty well from it.
Seems that even generic news outlets can provide enough quality to get people to give them money, even when the content is ad-supported free anyway.
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This is the model of the future. Legacy media is dying, just look at all the layoffs happening lately. And to be "advertiser friendly" they have to promote a corporate agenda. Most of their stuff is just stories they write about things they saw on Twitter.
Alternative media is growing rapidly, using the donation model primarily. They are building new studios, hiring people. And if their stuff isn't "advertiser friendly," so what? Sure YouTube will "demonetize" them, but they all have other sources of revenue
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As if the mainstream media are even doing that these days. They're all about publishing op-eds with some items from their Reuters streams picked out.
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Apple wants to be the new Elsevier but for news instead of science.
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Yeah but even accounting for any amount of hubris, 50% is too high. You need some new term like "Hubrosity" or "Exo-Hubris".
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Yeah but even accounting for any amount of hubris, 50% is too high. You need some new term like "Hubrosity" or "Exo-Hubris".
They probably actually think they are being quite generous.
Re: How ironic (Score:2)
s/hubris/the inexorably declining inertia of Steve Jobs' genius/
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But if we are talking the Economist, now we are talking Netflix for Magazines...
That is a little more tempting, but I have a feeling Apple's service will be $10/month, like Apple Music. There is no amount of news content that to me is worth $10 a month, even if I got all WSJ and Economist content for free. Maybe at $2/month... even that I would have trouble justifying on a recurring basis. I'd almost rather have the ability to pay $1 at a time for some long-form content I was really interested in.
As I
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I have my staples for news-- local paper, BBC, and a few other occasional sources. I use Apple Stocks on my mac, and aside from hating Business Insider as a miserable source of business news, appreciate the ostensibly greater variety of news sources. (I also have an ad blocker and a few simple tools to avoid paywalls.) My wife does pay for another newspaper subscription, and I would kind of like access to another news source that I can't avoid the paywall easily.
The value to the publishers all comes down
Translation (Score:3)
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Walled garden (Score:3, Insightful)
50% to set up shop. Protected by the city walls.
Free speech is a sin.
Curation of news can happen.
No Taiwan flag. No Tiananmen square.
Nothing that is offensive to a Communist party.
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And since we're americans, guns and blood are ok but nudity and female nipples are not.
Apple brings a huge audience... (Score:2)
...just like Google. This sounds like butthurt, same as the dinosaur news publications that want Google to cut them a check for daring the link to their stories....despite Google brining them an audience...
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Fair enough.
An antenna and OTA DVR (Score:2, Offtopic)
provide all the news I could ever care to consume.
I actually go out of my way to avoid any news not related to upcoming severe weather events and some sportsball information.
Why ? (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you are willing to pay for news, you want good news. The problem is that if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, then you aren't going to get good local coverage, unless you live in Washington.
The holy grail is to develop a business model that pays for good investigative journalism, and can cover local, national, and international stories. This is what Apple is proposing. A funding model where you get premium local content as well as premium national and international content.
I can only see two
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> For someone like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times to purchase large numbers of papers, and become so large that they control all the news: local, national and international.
"And," not "or" The problem is there are hundreds of newspapers that all distribute the same exact content from AP/Reuters. That just isn't going to work in a market with zero marginal costs (as opposed to the local monopolies for which that business model was developed). Frankly, I'm surprised that they haven't st
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Don't get it. I can read all day. I subscribe to two major papers. Why pay Apple ?
This isn't about you. It is about Apple desperately trying to find a way to plug the iPhone profit gap. Sales for smartphones will continue to decline across all markets as the industry has simply matured and reached market saturation. For Apple that is a really serious problem, because wall street bankers demand ever increasing profits, and making a reliable multi-billion dollar bottom line year on year is not important to them (they have already capitalised that and pocketed their fees).
If Tim Cook and hi
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Apple has their odious 'Apple Culture' to protect them. Virulent Not-Invented-Here xenophobia and ragged vicious zealotry.
Your subscription is no good here (Score:2)
I subscribe to two major papers.
When a friend shares with you a link to an article from a paper other than those two, and you go to read it, the paper's publisher is likely to tell you that your subscription is no good there.
wtf? They want credit card numbers? (Score:1)
Isn't that a bit dodgy?
Apple shouldn't even be storing the full credit card number. They should only have a token given to them by their payment provider, that only they can use.
I can understand them wanting email addresses of the people reading their content, purely for matching data. It would be better if Apple provided some kind of email address token service, where the content providers give apple their list of email addresses they want to match, Apple responds with tokens for each address and then they
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Isn't that a bit dodgy?
Apple shouldn't even be storing the full credit card number.
Not if they force you to use Apple Pay as your digital wallet when signing up. Which I'm sure they do. However, the article does not say that Apple keeps the credit card number - only that they're not providing it to the newspapers.
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Apple shouldn't (and almost certainly wouldn't, per PCI rules) store the full CC#. The CC information that the news outlets are wanting is likely everything other than the actual number - name and address in particular, as it's much harder to obtain a new (valid) credit card than it is to punch in a fake name or email address on a web form.
I'm not saying it isn't a bit sketchy, and I would hope Apple gives it the big old "nope", but it's probably not _as_ sketchy as it sounds on the surface.
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PCI rules have some insane requirements if you need to keep the whole card number, but it's not outright banned. Digital wallets need more than just a single-vendor token.
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To pay 50%.
Then the full 100% to publisher get the Apple approved news displayed.
News is now cost 50% extra.
Publishers should learn to code their own pay wall sites. Keep 100% of the profit.
Payment processing fee (Score:2)
Publishers should learn to code their own pay wall sites.
The problem with each publisher coding its own paywall comes when I want to read only one article or a handful of articles from a given publisher. Because of the roughly 0.30 USD transaction fee that credit card processors charge on top of their 3% cut, news publishers are unlikely to offer articles a la carte.[1] Instead, each publication requires readers to purchase a month's subscription to that publication or perhaps a pack of 100 page views from that publication. But once I've read the three articles t
It's not a bad idea (Score:2)
If we ignore for the moment the issue of Apple trying to get too big a piece of the revenue pie, the Netflix-for-news idea itself is actually rather good.
I read a lot of news, and I'd prefer to pay a reasonable amount of money and get quality content, over paying no money and getting ad-plastered click-bait.
The problem is that there are hundreds of newspapers out there, and my news feeds (Google News and Apple News) include articles from all of them, and most of them want me to sign up to pay them a small a
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WSJ subscription went up by 1/3 in 3 years. (Score:2)
Fuck Apple. (Score:1)
They're a boutique "name" that stupid people pay hyper-inflated prices for and receive no real value from.
They aren't innovating anything here. They're just relying on "We're Apple! Fat-Margins-R-Us".
Let them crash and burn on this.
Surveillance by proprietary software (Score:2)
Your content isn't worth the trouble. Toss me an add and let me see the content.
Some sites don't even toss me an ad. They toss me the URL of a third-party proprietary computer program written in JavaScript that surveils my browsing history across multiple websites and uses the battery life and Internet bandwidth that I pay for to choose an ad from one of a dozen or more ad networks. And if I say no to proprietary software [gnu.org] or no to surveillance [disconnect.me], these sites are incapable of falling back to a publisher-hosted ad like those seen on Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io] because interest-based [politico.com]
I already find the 30% for Apps too much (Score:2)
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At some level you can only keep up with so many subscriptions. Individuals maybe subscribe to 2 or 3 paywalls. I've moved away from the Bay Area and like those 2 - 3 Baywalls. Keep my couple online paywalls and need national paywalls to keep the pucker-brush from growing between my synapses. SO... needs exist that go beyond mere curiosity, luxury and convenience.
News aggregators feed into paywalls which 'Netflix for news' solves to the degree aggregators feed the monster paywall in the cloud.
"according to people familiar with the situation" (Score:2)
What are the chances that someone just made that 50% up so that they can claim later that Apple was forced to back down to a more reasonable figure?
Concern? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another concern for some publishers is that they likely wouldn't get access to subscriber data, including credit-card information and email addresses
Boo-fucking-hoo
Simple Gansta' (Score:2)
Tim Cook's ' More for Less' gangster strategy at its simplest reflects a globalist's mindspeak from an abundance of eyeballs it thinks it owns; hence the offer publishers can't refuse giving up ½ of their revenue.
The monopoly is eyeballs not context or distribution!