Apple News — The News App We Need

Apple News is a native news reading app introduced with iOS 9 in 2015. In spite of it’s shortcomings, I’ve used it heavily for almost a year now and have come to appreciate the value it brings to iOS, namely that it has replaced my other apps for 90% of the news reading. I want Apple News to be a success for many reasons and I believe it can be all that it was promised to users, publishers and advertisers. This article seeks to address the following:

Apple News: For You feed

• Highlight the strengths of the app
• Cover the glaring and not so glaring issues
• Suggest how Apple can improve it for users and publishers
• Reveal how publishers can best leverage News right now
• Explain why Apple News is important

Author Disclosures:

1) I was part of the Tech Evangelism team at Apple iAd and responsible for some of the advertising product go-to-market of Apple News. This doesn’t afford me any unique insights into usage or decisions made about the product — I wish that I knew more as an insider — but for all intents and purposes I’m an early adopter, power user and publisher.

2) Apple News was not my first experience launching a news aggregation app. I was previously the advertising product owner for a company called, Scribd, which released a nearly identical iOS app called Float back in 2011. It was consistently a top 15 news and reading app on the App Store and had over a 150 launch partners including Associated Press; TechCrunch covered the rise and fall back in 2012. So in this regard, I’m uniquely well informed about the challenges of taking a product like this to market and believe this history provides me some insight as to how publishers can have success with this channel.

Apple News at a Glance:

• Hastily cobbled together for iOS 9, June of 2015, which had somewhere between 40 and 70-million monthly users.
• Intended to replace Apple Newstand as the one app for all your news, blog and periodical reading
• One major redesign in 2016 with iOS 10.
• Aggregates content into a feed called, For You, which is curated by Apple editors, app onboarding, and machine learning based on user settings, likes and dislikes.
• Provides it’s own native markup language, called Apple News Format (ANF), publishing tools, and third-party plugins; more info availablehere.
• Not all content uses ANF and is displayed in mobile web form, horrendous, untargeted advertising and all.
• ANF gives publishers some hooks into the native device capabilities and features that app developers are used to on iOS.
• Publishers keep 100% of the ads they sell on their content, 70% of ads sold by Apple (NBC Universal) on For You between article swipes and inline on the feed, as well as backfill ads in articles.

What to Love About Apple News:

• Appearance — ANF articles can look fantastic and native device features certainly draw the user in more than mobile web content.
• Consolidation — one of Apple News’ core value propositions — that one app contains all (most) of your news.
• Curation — both human and machine curation provides broad coverage from publishers and topics you follow.
• User Control — mechanisms to provide feedback, such as liking and disliking content.
• Privacy — Apple’s differential privacy model is a benefit to News readers, as it protects our reading habits from aggressive marketers (including Apple).
• Barrier to Entry — publishing requires Apple’s approval and must meet a standard for editorial content.
• Content Quality — significantly less click-bait articles in my For You feed, as compared to Facebook and it’s hybrid-collaborative-filtering-based, only-the-news-you-will-like/engage-with approach to content curation.
• Device Search — device search provides a direct link to specific articles as opposed to the search in app that returns topic and channel results.
• Revenue Sharing — right in line w/ every other ad networks; now more favorable to publishers who can sell their inventory.
• Backfill Advertising Inventory — NBC Universal selling the For Yousection may help advertisers jump onboard; iAd previously bungled the sales launch of Radio (complete disaster) and News, both of which were poorly conceived by iAd.
• Marketing Channel for Publishers — Publishers now have a place in iOS that doesn’t require them to compete in the crowded app store or spend on app download advertising.
• Apple Influence — Apple is giving the publishing business some real attention and that’s an exciting proposition. Previous attempts by startups like Flipboard and Scribd, who had the brains and technical knowhow, lacked the influence to really transform the space.

A Troubled App and Strategy:

There’s a lot to love about Apple News, evidenced by the substantial list above. But, some of the positives fail to mask glaring issues that make the app a poor choice for readers and publishers.

• Native App Bloat — Yet another native app to be stuffed away in a folder. At launch with iOS9, for some users the icon appeared on the last screen of their device.
• What is Apple News? — This is something that I heard six-months after the launch from rooms full of advertising agency executives. It’s like Flipboard, but not as good was another common declaration. If advertisers do not use it or think it’s cool….
• Appearance — is this really a strength? Some articles look great, but there’s a lot of Apple News Format vomit in native articles. ANF is yet another markup to add to the publisher CMS and in my opinion that was a strategic flop.
• Curation — my feed often has a whole lot of stuff I don’t care about. Apple doesn’t know your reading preferences beyond the publications and topics you select, so it’s never going to be as well curated as Google News of Facebook Instant Articles.
• User Control — the dislike mechanism isn’t explicit enough to reward user’s efforts. I have been disliking NFL content endlessly and it wasn’t clear if it was having an impact until I disliked ALL NFL content.
• Mobile Web — while there is a lot of great quality content, there is still more mobile web format content than ANF. That means that I get untargeted, full-page takeover ads, jumpy javascript responsive-designed pages and click-bait recommendations right along w/ the ANF content.
• App Search — app search returns results from topics and channels (publishers), but device search will show me articles related to my query. This makes search in app feel very clunky and irrelevant.
• Revenue — publishers can paygate their content, keep revenue from ads and share in ad revenue on the feed, but this will be a small line item given that the short time users spend in app is on For You. Users need to stay within a channel, swiping between articles, being exposed to 8 to 10 advertisements in the process.
• Display Ads — standard display ads use safe zones to enable for fewer ad sizes. This makes text very small for some ads. Ads between articles? Swiping between articles is unnatural because the poorly curated feed trains the user to scan, swipe to dislike, and tap the back button to return to the feed. The result: more ads to ignore, poor performance for advertisers and less revenue for publishers.
• Advertising Scale — with the requirement that ads use proprietary JavaScript and an Apple creative development application called iAd Producer, there will never be an opportunity for a large ad network to provide backfill supply to publishers. There may still be enough to fill the ad requests, but all I ever see are subscription house ads.
• Navigation — god forbid you read a mobile web article and click on a recommendation or photo gallery that changes the URL of the page. That back button literally takes you back, which is some case can mean you sit and click baack through every mobile web page visited.
• Apple Influence — arriving late and underdelivering is a real shame. Publishers were excited, until they learned of the sales strategy handed down from the top of iAd. Your positions on privacy and ability to transform industries are unmatched. And yet, you delivered a dumb version of a me-too news app. You be you, Apple and fans will follow.

You Must Do Better, Apple:

I’m a huge fan and have contributed a fair amount of time liking, disliking and muting articles in my feed. I did this with the knowledge of exactly how to get more out of the app. But, it’s very unrealistic to believe that users will commit to what is a very poorly executed app in nearly every way. I also find it hard to imagine that Apple News is having the intended impact on publishers. Are they generating revenue from ads or memberships? Can they even return any value to their advertisers or users for their efforts integrating ANF?

It’s not too late — even Apple can make a pivot and here’s what they should do.

• No more ads on For You — you don’t do advertising well, Apple, and you shouldn’t! Advertisers and publishers want data, you won’t provide attribution, you won’t share user attributes, you don’t allow 3rd-party ad serving, your ads have to be bundled using proprietary applications (iAd Producer), and the ads look terrible. If you won’t make concessions on data or provide ad tech solutions that are ubiquitous across all advertising networks, get out of the game and put those resources toward…
• Enable 3rd-party Ad Serving — let publishers serve Google Adsense and their ad server publisher tags in a safe webview from within their content. Ad rates will be lower in-app due to restrictions on gathering page and user-level data, but this can partially be overcome through publisher-to-Apple data matching and aggregated reports on iTunes attributes. Publishers already have data on their readers, so at least you can allow them to match ad views by their own audience. This would enable publishers to sell against their own data and would not violate your Differential Privacy model.
• Make a desktop version — why would you not? Here is a very valid use-case for a desktop version: people don’t do work on their mobile devices!
• Tap out to Safari — currently hyperlinks in the articles open a limited webview of the destination page. This webview uses WKWebView and limits the browser controls to simply a back arrow. Apple should use UIViewController to handle links out (as they do on the “Already a Subscriber” link in the subscription banners) because it allows the browser to be closed, returning the user to the article, rather than forcing them to continuously tap back from page to page. Why does this matter? Because WKWebView’s limited functionality can mean you can’t return to the app after extensively browsing from a link tapped in an article — a horrendous user experience that requires you to kill the app to escape the webview.
• No more Apple News Format — asking publishers to integrate your format is silly. Publishers are resource constrained like never before and you have a team of designers helping them integrate. Scrape the content, let the publishers login to the publishing portal and choose from different styles and give more control over the appearance to users. The idea that having a great looking article on Apple News will entice users to read more from a publisher or help the publisher differentiate their content is poorly conceived at best. Do you remember the time when news was black, white and read all over?
• Make the app entirely subscription and in-app purchase based — here’s how this works: users pay a monthly fee to read unlimited news. This fee can be shared with publishers based on engagement. Articles and single day subscriptions can use in-app, microtransactions (just like iTunes). With device search pushing users into the app and to a paywall, they will eventually pay for the article or buy a subscription.
• Focus For You around Publishers — I know, this is counter to all other news aggregation apps and users love a continuous feed of headlines to scan. This can’t continue because it is harmful to jounalism and has resulted in click-bait headlines and fake news that will continue to burn readers. Publishers build loyalty through integrity and their unique voices reaching out to those who share some of their worldview. By continuing to aggregate all news into a curated feed, you perpetuate a problem that is killing your app — users are locked in a negative, reinforcing feedback loop of scanning headlines for 1-minute and closing the app. By making For You Channel focused, you will encourage users to search for coverage by publishers on topics of interest and help publishers develop unique content to appeal to their audience. Publishers without an audience cannot make unique content and, therefore, no more Apple News. If publisher have an audience turning multiple page views per session, they could serve them ads and actually provide value back to their advertisers! I could go on and on here….

There is so much more, but this is how Apple can make an about-face and refocus on revenue and real change for publishers! If they can do this — and perhaps this is a chicken and egg situation — publishers can then respond with making changes of their own to support Apple News. Will users not use the app because it’s not another aggregated topic feed? No — they want quality and there’s no reason why topics can’t be discovered in a publisher focused feed.

Make the Best of it, Publishers:

Publishers, if you’re reading this, you cannot wait around for Apple and here’s how you can get the most out of Apple News:

• Publish Unique Video Content — this is asking a lot, but publishers who are using unique video content have an advantage over those who are syndicating their articles to News. Users are more likley to tap on video content in News and it will differentiate your content in the feed. There should be a race to publish unique video to News those who do it first will increase their likelihood of gaining mindshare and build an audience in the app due to the way content is aggregated based on user input. Text-based journalism is important and should accompany video, but video is a key differentiator in the crowded For You feed. Video can also earn greater ad revenue and frees up your display ad space for…
• Use Apple News Format Sparingly and Purposefully — Don’t get carried away with too many different ANF features in one article. I’ve seen an incredible amount of markup vomit in articles and appearance of your articles is secondary to functionality. Using it purposefully means separating text, galleries and video into their own articles, as opposed to including them all in one. Apple should work harder to actually make ANF do something really cool… I have a few ideas.
• Build Galleries — one of the key benefits to ANF is the native swipe functionality of the image galleries. This is an area where ANF shines and another way to differentiate your content. Galleries can include captions, so you’re telling the story with pictures and providing another experience to users
• Use Context Specific Headlines — sure, a catchy healine will get a user clicking, but publishing content (be it ancillary or the full-article) using a headline that includes context, like VIDEO or GALLERY, captures the users who are scanning and is yet another way to differentiate your articles in the feed. Readers will appreciate it and spend more time reading on your channel.
• Use House Ads Creatively — you can’t rely on Apple News recommendations to get users turning multiple pages of your content. Utilize in-article ad space to promote other content — preferably unique video content — and capture those users who are not reading an article to completion. I’ve had a great deal of success with this monetizing Scribd and I can assure you that a great number of users are bailing prior to landing in the recommendations.

Apple News is Important and We Need It:

With the release of iOS 10, the recent glut of “fake news” delivered by Google and Facebook, and the challenges faced by journalists and editorial news publishers, Apple has an opportunity to shake things up and give us something better than the News we want — they can give us the News we need!

Apple News could be much better and I believe the ways I’ve outlined here will have a positive impact. Apple’s respect for your data and privacy are important to users and publishers — it can help return to integrity in reporting on issues both popular and unpopular — and the responses from other aggregators caught feeding garbage to readers will simply be censorship.

We need Apple News to be successful so publishers can have an unbiased channel on iOS. We need Apple to step up with a real vision for the future of publishing, one that addresses confirmation bias as well as revenue for publishers. Giving the reader control over the curation might be laissez-faire and it doesn’t eliminate “fake news” from reaching an audience, but it makes it a choice without silencing other voices. Besides, today’s “fake news” could be tomorrows real story.