Wednesday August 12th: Apple News+ set to hijack publisher traffic

August 12, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Let's start the morning by getting your blood boiling (mine certainly is). Apple's upcoming operating system, iOS 14 - which we should point out is still in beta- will redirect News+ subscribers to the Apple News app by default if they click on a story in search from a publisher enrolled in Apple News+.

So far, this only appears to affect Apple News+ subscribers and publishers. But it's a hugely concerning step for any publisher with a presence in Apple News.

Not only does this bypass any ad revenue publishers make on their own sites, but it also makes these readers invisible to most web analytics tools. This will do little to serve those publishers trying to become more reliant on their own first-party data. In addition, it directly cannibalises a publisher's core subscription audience.

There are benefits of this for Apple and its users, providing a smoother user journey around paywalls for News+ subscribers. It gives the tech giant a way to scale News+ far quicker. But at what cost?

In short, Apple is now not just encouraging readers to consume news on their own platform. They're actively hijacking the user journey to boost their own numbers. Once again, in the platform vs publishers battle, publishers lose out.

This is a smart piece from Mollie Leavitt at The Idea about the growth of Grist, a nonprofit climate news site. Grist has grown significantly this year, seeing a 51% increase in revenue and 94% increase in membership. The CEO walks through how that growth came about and their planned relaunch.

We've posted about the individual newsletter trend before, but this is a wonderful deep-dive into one corner of these: food newsletters. As food magazines and newspaper food sections face budget cuts, writers are turning to newsletters, and some are making pretty decent money from them.

In the latest game of whack-a-mole between Facebook and fake news, Pages on Facebook belonging to news outlets that are backed by political groups or people will no longer be eligible for inclusion in the Facebook News tab. They'll still be allowed to advertise though. This only applies to the US for now, but if and when the News tab gets rolled out more widely, these restrictions will follow.

Today's throwback:

Ah...remember when we could actually go places and meet people?! For our 100th episode last May, we were joined by Terri White, Kerin O'Connor, Ellen Stewart and Mads Holmen to discuss whether publishers can maintain brand identity in a world of distributed content. A discussion that's more relevant than ever given today's top story.

I've eaten my bodyweight in ice cream so far this week. If you fancy chipping in for a virtual ice-cream for us on Ko-Fi, we'd massively appreciate it (although the money will go towards hosting and equipment costs, not actual ice cream sadly).