Apple Reportedly Prepping a Subscription-Based News Product

According to sources, Apple, which acquired the magazine app Texture, now plans to integrate it into Apple News and launch it as a premium subscription product. Texture let users subscribe to more than 200 magazines for $9.99 per month. Apple cut 20 Texture employees, and brought the rest onto the Apple News team. The premium subscription version of Apple News, which will reportedly debut in the next year, will give publishers a cut of the subscription revenue. Apple did not comment on the story. Continue reading Apple Reportedly Prepping a Subscription-Based News Product

Apple Newsstand Leads to Surge in Digital Publication Subs and Sales

  • Condé Nast reports a 268 percent increase in digital subscriptions for nine of its titles since joining Apple’s Newsstand two weeks ago.
  • Publisher of “The New Yorker,” “Vanity Fair” and “Wired” has seen a tenfold increase in digital subscriptions and single-copy sales across all platforms since September 2010.
  • “If other publishers are seeing the kinds of lift that Condé Nast is… it represents an initial validation of the demand for a separate area for periodicals, away from games like Angry Birds or social media apps like Instagram and Foursquare,” suggests paidContent.
  • However, while digital sales surge (Next Issue Media projects aggregate revenue of $3 billion by 2014), ad sales are reportedly slow to follow, which means publishers will need to carefully evaluate how to leverage the new consumer purchase activity on tablets.