Apple is going to outsource all of their Apple News advertisements to NBCUniversal in early 2017. This deal was done because Apple shuttered their iAd network in June and they do not have a dedicated advertising unit anymore.
Apple News launched last year in the US and the United Kingdom. They currently have over 70 million subscribers and major news organizations such The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, will still be able to sell their own ads and keep all of the revenue, but now NBCUniversal, rather than Apple, will sell the extra inventory.
NBCUniversal would not say how the revenue would be split for the ads it sells against other publishers’ content; in the past, publishers would get 70% of the revenue with the other 30% going to Apple.
Many news organizations are finding that Apple News is the catalyst for driving page views to their online publications. CNN’s chief product officer, Alex Wellen, told the Nieman Lab that the network’s Apple News content got more than 36 million unique readers in September, which is more than seven times what it got the month before that. The company’s page views also jumped to almost 275 million from just 43 million. Bloomberg also says its traffic from Apple News has led to a 500% increase in October because more of their articles are appearing in the Apple Top News section.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
