First announced at WWDC 2015, Apple’s News app is similar to Flipboard and other news readers, with the purpose of offering the best news reading experience it can for users.
At WWDC, 18 publishers and 50 titles were announced as coming to News. Now Apple has signed more than 50 publisher agreements for hundreds of titles. The publishers run the gamut from old to new and include The New York Times, Conde Nast, Hearst, Wenner Media, The Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, Bloomberg and Vox. Mashable has also signed on with the new News app.
Apple’s goal with News is to create a good reading experience for users, while also creating a good business model for publishers. In that way, Apple is allowing publishers to sell its own ads within the news app and take 100 per cent of the revenue. If publishers can’t fill all of the ad space, they can opt to use iAd to backfill, for the standard 70/30 revenue split with publishers and Apple.
In this way, Apple is hoping to create what it sees as a viable news platform for discovering, consuming and distributing news.
Tools and curation
One of the potential benefits of Apple News is that it isn’t simply a beautified RSS reader; Apple wants to offer publishers a platform to present articles in a visually compelling way.
Right now, Apple has an API that larger publishers can use to integrate with their CMS systems to publish directly to the system or to implement Apple News elements. Conde Nast’s Wired and National Geographic have already used the tools to present articles in this style.
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