The New York Times said Monday it was pulling out of its partnership with Apple News as news organizations struggle to compete with big tech companies for readers’ attention and dollars.
As of Monday, the Times stories no longer appeared alongside articles from other posts in the curated Apple News feed available on Apple devices.
The Times is one of the first media organizations to withdraw from Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business objective, said Apple had given it little in terms of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. He said he hoped to take readers directly to his own website and mobile app so that he could “finance quality journalism.”
“The core of a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path to send those readers back to our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules” Meredith Kopit Levien, COO, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit these parameters.”
An Apple spokesman said The Times “only offered Apple News a few stories a day” and that the company would continue to provide readers with reliable information from thousands of publishers. “We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through proven business models of advertising, subscription and commerce,” he said.
The news business has had a difficult relationship with Silicon Valley for decades. Companies like Google and Facebook have decimated newspaper ad sales and broke news sites by positioning their own platforms as one of the main ways people can consume news.
However, when Apple created a news app in late 2015, promising to work with publishers to help them build a business, many news executives were cautiously optimistic.
Unlike other tech companies, Apple did not compete with news sites for advertising dollars. And Apple took an approach that was antithetical to how its Silicon Valley peers handled headlines: It only allowed top news organizations in the app, and humans, not algorithms, ranked top stories.
Apple’s aggressive promotion of Apple News on iPhones has earned it an audience of approximately 125 million monthly readers, making the app one of the most widely read news sources in the world. But in-app advertising has generated little revenue for news organizations. For any subscription sold in the app, Apple also has a 30 percent cut.
Last year, Apple introduced a new way for publishers to earn money: Apple News +, a subscription service within its news app that provides access to hundreds of publications, which generally have digital pay walls, for $ 9.99 per month.
Apple told publishers that the service would offer customers that they would not otherwise get. But many publications would be undercutting their own prices and would have to share half of Apple News + ‘s revenue with dozens of other news organizations. Apple took the other half for itself.
Still, many editors took risks, including The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wired. Months after its debut, many publishers were disappointed by the sales, according to Digiday, a digital media news site.
The Times executives broadcast Apple News + and then reduced the number of articles they supplied to Apple News. In an interview with Reuters last year, Mark Thompson, chief executive of The Times, warned other news organizations about the risks of partnering with Apple.
“We tend to be quite suspicious about the idea of almost getting people used to finding our journalism elsewhere,” he said.
The Times said last month that its total subscribers had exceeded 6 million. Revenue has increased since digital subscriptions, even as the company grapples with an ad slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Times has had a complex relationship with the big tech companies. He has experienced working with Facebook, even in an effort called Instant Articles several years ago.
But The Times stopped producing instant articles for the social network in 2017, saying it wasn’t making enough income. Now Facebook pays The Times to present their stories in the news tab on the Facebook app, the company’s latest effort to partner with the news industry. Times stories also appear on Google News, which sends readers to publishers’ websites, unlike Apple News, which generally keeps readers on the Apple app.
In her note to employees, Ms. Levien said that leaving the partnership with Apple News was not expected to have “a material impact” on The Times business and that the company would work with Apple in other ways, including on apps. , podcasts and hardware. .
