David Hanak After less than a year at Apple, the director of the division for Apple News, Liz Schimel, ended, because the service for 11 months of operation is not working far from the way the management at Apple imagined.
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Liz Schimel joined Apple in mid-2018. Until then, she worked as director of international business at Conde Nast publishing house. From this personnel acquisition, Apple apparently promised that a person with experience in global publishing would be exactly what the company needed to launch Apple News. As a result, however, it seems that these goals have not been achieved very well.
As part of a small historical window, it is worth remembering that Apple News as a function was created in 2015. At that time, it functioned as an aggregate of articles from various corners of the Internet. Since last March, the service has been transformed into a paid product in which Apple offers centralized access to many magazines, newspapers and other publications. Unfortunately, Apple failed to secure cooperation contracts with the two largest publishers behind the New York Times and the Washington Post, which most likely greatly affected the success of the service, especially in the domestic market.
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Jaromir Miko The Apple News service faces many problems, including limited or incomplete offer or complex monetization. Apple's service earns both through monthly user fees and through advertising space placed directly in the application. The problem is that the fewer users that use the service, the less lucrative space there is for ads. And it is precisely the profitability of the service that Apple wants to work on. During the latest conference call with shareholders, information was dropped that the app has 100 million monthly users. However, this wording deliberately does not mention the ratio of paying and non-paying users, which will probably not be so famous.
Currently, the burning issue with the service is that it is only available in a handful of markets, namely the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. That way, Apple can't siphon monthly fees from users living outside English-speaking countries, of which there are a lot. It is probably not worth it for the Czech, and therefore the Slovak, market. It should make sense in large markets such as Germany, France or Spanish-speaking countries. Another potential issue may be the profitability of the service for publishing houses as such. This has been indirectly discussed by several people in the industry in the past, and it seems that the conditions for publishing are not nearly as favorable as they might like. For some of them (and this should also be the case for the Washington Post and the New York Times), involvement in Apple News is actually loss-making, as the daily/magazine would earn more with its own monetization. Apple obviously needs to work on the business model to convince other publishers to join Apple News. Expansion into other regions will also undoubtedly help the service.
Because the added value is zero.