Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Apple's News Subscription Service Still Doesn't Get It Right - Bloomberg

Apple's News Subscription Service Still Doesn't Get It Right - Bloomberg



...Apple went about creating the universal subscription in a boring, unimaginative way: It offered publishers access to its large installed base, offered to pay per view (like the Dutch start-up Blendle, which, however, also charges readers this way) and claimed a huge revenue cut: 50 percent. Then it went ahead without those who didn’t want to play by these rules.

The New York Times, meanwhile, has nothing against bundles: It has onewith Scribd, which also offers access to magazines and books. But bundling cuts into profit margins, and adding Apple’s cut makes playing along financially unattractive to a publisher confident of being able to sell its content without Apple’s help.
... fewer than 3 percent of monthly visitors run into a paywall as most people read fewer stories than their free monthly allotment.
... for example, some kind of digital key that lets a reader unlock the paywalls of all participating publishers until a monthly limit of articles is reached. The subscription price would depend on the limit, say, 200, 500 or 1,000 articles per month, and a publisher’s share of subscription revenue would depend on the share of a subscriber’s traffic that the publisher captures.

No comments:

Post a Comment