Tuesday 21st May: Publishers turn to Apple News for revenue

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

How can you use newsletters as part of a retention and conversion strategy? Immediate’s Head of CRM and Customer Retention Matt Nash will be speaking at the Publisher Newsletter Summit about using newsletters to support different parts of the customer journey, what data analysis tools to use, and more.

Have we learned nothing from the last decade?! Apparently not. As search traffic becomes more erratic and relationships with other social media platforms go south, apparently some publications are looking to Apple as a ‘new lifeline’.

For mid-sized publication The Daily Beast, Apple’s News+ programme has had an immediate - and positive - impact, putting the publisher on track to make $3-4 million in revenue this year from Apple News alone. That’s great in the short term, but as we’ve seen countless times, you cannot build a sustainable business on someone else’s turf.

The one thing I will say from this, which Max Tani points out, is that Apple News+ is a useful discovery platform for (usually high-value) readers who aren’t otherwise familiar with a brand. But strategically, the focus for publishers MUST be on building a direct relationship with those readers. (And yes, you can use Apple News to build first-party data…)

Dział Zagraniczny’s “Foreign Department” is among the country’s top 20 most popular podcasts with over 100,000 regular listeners, and impressive revenue, to the extent he’s now able to hire his first employee. A great success story for a non-English language podcast, as well as exploring what Polish media may have missed. Oh, and it’s another opportunity for me to plug the Publisher Podcast Summit on June 12th.

Empire Media Group struck a licensing deal with Bauer to relaunch Q after the title was hit badly by the pandemic. However, nearly 6 months after relaunch, it’s being shut down again. Editor-in-chief Andrew Barker wrote: “As is increasingly the case in this business, the decision to pull the plug came with no advance warning, and no indication that anything was wrong. To say that we were shocked and devastated would be a colossal understatement.”

Toolkits’ Jack Marshall has asked a few publishers last week what impact they think the move will have on their businesses and the replies were interesting. One described it as “end game for publishers that rely on “utility content”. Another said it was “The final nail in the coffin for them working with Google.” A third replied with a gif of an asteroid wiping out a planet.

More from Media Voices