Browsing Category
Digital Publishing News
3759 posts
Good e-Reader gives you the inside scoop on the entire digital publishing industry. Since 2007 we have been the leading news agency devoted to audiobooks, ebooks, manga, magazines and newspapers.
Apple Texture Relaunch has digital newspaper companies worried
The Texture relaunch will be a premium product that will be rolled into Apple News. As part of this relaunch, Apple is looking to incorporate newspapers as well as magazines, but it sounds like some publishers aren’t sold on the all-you-can-eat approach to news. They worry that Texture may effectively steal subscribers by offering access for less than some of these publications charge for their own subscriptions.
Top-tier newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the primary focus for Apple, both of which provide a small selection of free content in the News app today. But getting just a small piece of Apple’s $10 subscription would be a huge drop in per-reader revenue for those daily newspapers.
Apple believes that newspaper publishers would be making a substantial amount of money – potentially more money than some publications make from their existing subscriber bases. The pitch to newspaper companies is that the Apple News app is installed by default in 1.3 billion iOS devices (and is part of macOS Mojave, too). Even if just a fraction of those users subscribe to the premium Texture content, it could mean tens of millions of new subscribers or more. Just a few cents a month from each of them could generate millions in revenue for those newspapers.
People tend to get their news from social media
Social media’s small edge over print emerged after years of steady declines in newspaper circulation and modest increases in the portion of Americans who use social media, One-in-five U.S. adult (20%) are getting news from social media. Twitter and Facebook remain the most popular, but Youtube is catching up. These days it’s become a hot topic amid concerns that fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate speech can easily spread over these platforms. At the same time, both mainstream media groups and local newspapers have been trying to use social media to gain readers, but algorithm changes on Facebook and Google can tank traffic in a matter of hours.