Media Briefing: Publishers see Apple News+ as a stable revenue stream amid ‘volatile’ referral traffic

• The LA Times pulls AI bias meter, The Wall Street Journal reorganizes tech coverage and more

Apple News+ audiences are ‘growing’

Publishers are feeling quietly optimistic about Apple’s latest efforts to develop its news subscription product.

Apple News+ will include a new food section with the iOS 18.4 update in April — a welcome addition for publishers facing ongoing pressure from declining platform referral traffic.

Dotdash Meredith is one of 21 Apple News+ publisher partners joining Apple News+ Food, bringing in its publications Allrecipes, Food & Wine, Serious Eats, Better Homes & Gardens and Real Simple. Condé Nast, Hearst and U.K. publishers the Telegraph and Good Food will also be featured in the new section, which will pull in recipes and food-related stories like restaurant reviews and travel articles from the featured publishers.

These changes could mean more revenue for publishers that are part of Apple News’ publisher program, in which they receive a cut of Apple News+’s subscription revenue based on reader engagement. And while it remains unclear how much revenue publishers stand to make at this point (publishers tend to be tight-lipped when it comes to talking about Apple News numbers), some executives are bullish on the updates.

“We expect a pretty significant change in engagement,” said Alysia Borsa, chief business officer and president of lifestyle at Dotdash Meredith. She said she expects the food section to boost engagement and revenue for the publisher’s food content, but declined to quantify the anticipated impact.

Dotdash Meredith has been an Apple News+ partner since 2018, and all of its food publications will be featured in the April update, Borsa said. There is no additional financial incentive to sign on to the food section, she noted — only the potential for greater visibility and discovery of their food content. Borsa declined to share exactly how much Apple News+ revenue or engagement is growing, but insisted that both “continue to grow” and are doing so “consistently.”

In general, publishers seem to have a good relationship with Apple News — and that stands out at a time when relationships with other platforms are strained. Referral traffic from social media players like Facebook and X has steadily declined as those companies prioritize keeping users on their own platforms. Meanwhile, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are scraping publishers’ content without driving meaningful traffic back to those publishers’ sites to make up for the losses from social referrers. Click-through rates associated with AI platforms are 95.7% lower than traditional Google search, with a referral rate of just 0.37%, according to a report from publisher analytics and licensing platform TollBit.

Semafor reported last spring that Apple News+ was a “lifeline” for some publishers, helping to bring in traffic and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

Apple News+ Food bears similarities with The New York Times’ Cooking experience. Users can save recipes, scroll through curated sections, search for recipes in categories like “easy” and “vegetarian,” and generally view recipes in a clean, easy-to-read user experience. However, Apple’s version aggregates recipes from multiple publishers, and has a few nifty features like being able to tap on an ingredient to see how much of it you need without scrolling back to the ingredients list.

The resemblance isn’t surprising — while The New York Times doesn’t break out how many subscribers pay for its Cooking app, its latest earnings report showed that a third of its 10.8 million subscribers were paying for only its Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products.

Apple News+, which launched six years ago, now has over 400 titles, according to Andrew Bradick, product manager at Apple. The platform charges $12.99 a month for a bundled subscription that gives users access to publishers’ paywalled articles. Digiday has previously reported that publishers get 50% of subscription revenue from Apple, based on how much time subscribers spend with publishers’ content in a month. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on whether revenue share terms have changed.

The Atlantic has been an Apple News+ partner since the offering launched in 2019. The partnership has since become an important part of the publisher’s business strategy, for both audience and monetization, according to Megha Garibaldi, The Atlantic’s chief growth officer.

“Apple is by far the most valuable syndication partner for The Atlantic. Engagement on Apple News has been growing, especially at a time when traffic from other previously reliable platforms is becoming more volatile,” Garibaldi said.

Garibaldi declined to share specific audience and revenue figures related to traffic coming from Apple News+ to The Atlantic’s content, but said there has been “a consistent increase” in engagement on the platform month over month.

Meanwhile, Newsweek saw its largest audience ever on Apple News+ last year, according to Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at the publisher.

“It was bigger than 2023 by a significant percentage. … It’s growing,” said Awtry, though he declined to share by how much.

Matthew Karolian, vp of platforms, research and development at Boston Globe Media, told Digiday that he hopes to experiment with one of the company’s publications on Apple News+ soon.

But while being an Apple News+ partner seems to have its merits, it’s a different story for those trying to make money from ads on the free Apple News platform. Monetization has been “shockingly abysmal” on Apple News, in comparison to the audience the platform generates — at least according to one publishing exec at a large news publisher, who spoke to Digiday under the condition of anonymity.

They described revenue from ads on Apple News in the “low hundreds of thousands a year, when it would be millions if it were [on-site] traffic.” That’s despite the fact that Apple News gives 70% of ad revenue to publishers, they said.

Apple started selling its own ad inventory for the free version of the Apple News app last November, hoping to drive revenue for the tech company and for publishers, Axios reported.

What we’ve heard

“It’s definitely a really dark moment. If you want to continue to be employed in that part of the business, it’s going to be a lot more difficult at best, and maybe impossible for a lot of people. I’ve already had a couple of colleagues just in the last few months leave for non-journalism jobs.”

— An opinion section newspaper employee, on the changes happening to editorial boards and op-ed sections at major newspapers like The Washington Post.

Numbers to know

40%: The growth of AI bot scrapes that bypassed robots.txt between Q3 and Q4, according to a TollBit report.

2.1%: Year-over-year digital revenue growth at Reach plc, to £130 million (about $166 million).

48: The number of LA Times newsroom employees taking buyouts.

75,000: The number of Washington Post digital subscribers that have cancelled since owner Jeff Bezos announced changes to the paper’s opinion section.

400,000: The number of subscribers to AI newsletter products created by local digital news platform Patch.

What we’ve covered

Puck grows paid subscribers by 30%

• Newsletter-focused publisher Puck expects to become profitable this year after experiencing subscriber base growth in the past year.
• Puck CEO Sarah Personette said Puck has added more journalists to its ranks to build out sub-brands from its newsletter franchises anchored by core talent.

Hear how Puck’s journalists are being compensated for this growth in the latest episode of Digiday’s podcast here.

News U.K. profits from brand safety pivot

• When News U.K. replaced brand safety firm Integral Ad Science with another vendor, brand safe ad inventory increased by up to 20%.
• That’s thanks to a more nuanced classification system, which has resulted in the number of brand safety categories the publisher had available to advertisers growing by more than 37% in 2024 compared to the previous year.

Read more about how this approach has helped unlock ad revenue for News U.K. here.

Study finds journalists are using generative AI tools without company oversight

• Nearly half of journalists surveyed in a new report said they are using generative AI tools for work that are not approved or bought by their organization.
• Journalists said they expect using AI for processes like transcription and translation, information gathering, and analyzing large volumes of data to increase in the next few years.

Read more about how newsrooms are dealing with this issue here.

News podcast listeners over-index on video podcast consumption

• News podcast listeners are more likely to use YouTube to watch videos and consume and find podcasts, compared to non-news podcast listeners, a report found.
• The report — by NPR, NPM and Sounds Profitable — found 87% of news podcast listeners say they consume video podcasts, and 59% of news podcast listeners say they have spent more time on YouTube in the last 12 months.

Read more about news podcast listeners’ video consumption here.

What we’re reading

Los Angeles Times pulls AI feature rating political bias of op-eds

The Los Angeles Times pulled a generative AI feature that rates the political bias of op-eds one day after it went live, after it downplayed the KKK, The Wrap reported. It was part of the changes LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is introducing in an effort to help readers distinguish opinion content from news reporting, according to a memo he wrote to readers.

Google changes hurt product review sites

Product review sites owned by CNN and Forbes have suffered from falling traffic and revenue due to Google’s change to how those sites appear in its search platform, The Wall Street Journal reported. Publishers are cutting ties with freelancers to try to get back on the algorithm’s good side.

Marty Baron criticizes Jeff Bezos’ leadership of The Washington Post

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron claims the newspaper’s owner Jeff Bezos has “damaged” the Post’s reputation by trying to placate president Donald Trump, in an op-ed for The Atlantic. Baron outlines Bezos’ previously tough defense of the free press against Trump, which has evolved into more “accommodating” language.

The Wall Street Journal reorganizes tech reporting teams

The Wall Street Journal is making changes to its tech coverage by reconfiguring beats and moving teams around, Talking Biz News reported. Editor in chief Emma Tucker said this means some reporters and editors in San Francisco and New York will be let go.