Magazine publishers are on board with Apple’s new subscription news service. Newspapers aren’t.
Apple says it wants to help save journalism.All it wants in return is half of all the revenue journalists make when they sell their stuff through a forthcoming new Apple subscription service.Cue internet outrage.The argument, made by everyone from my colleague Casey Newton to Apple blogger John Gruber: 50 percent is way, way too high — “insane,” in Gruber’s words — given that Apple normally takes 15 percent to 30 percent of the revenue it generates when someone buys something from its App Store. Insult to injury: Apple’s new arch-enemy Facebook takes zero percent when it helps someone subscribe to a publication.So what is Apple thinking now?Here’s the short answer, which I’ve cobbled together by talking to industry sources: Apple has already signed many publishers to deals where they’ll get 50 percent of the revenue Apple generates through subscriptions to its news service, which is currently called Texture and will be relaunched as a premium version of Apple News this spring.And some publishers are happy to do it, because they think Apple will sign up many millions of people to the new service. And they’d rather have a smaller percentage of a bigger number than a bigger chunk of a smaller number.In the words of a publishing executive who is optimistic about Apple’s plans: “It’s the absolute dollars paid out that matters, not the percentage.”That argument seems unlikely to persuade the big newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, that Apple is trying to add to its service....MORE
