Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is considering introducing paywalls on its news app, Apple News, as one of the ways of ensuring publishers have full control of who reads their articles. Reuter’s reports that such a feature could also help differentiate the iPhone maker’s app from other apps in the highly crowded segment more so from Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB)’s Instant Articles.
Making Publishers Happy
Providing a way for publishers to bill users who want to read their articles could help Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in partnership with more publishers. Some publishers have remained reluctant to sign up for the likes of Instant Articles out of fear of losing a key revenue stream. Up until now the tech giant has successfully worked with more than 100 publishers.
Making paid content available through Apple News, publishers should also be able to maintain and build new relationships with subscribers. It is, however, unclear how Apple intends to go about with the purported paywall scheme. It would be interesting to see what cut it would end up taking from readers accessing content from the news app.
Proposed Paywall
Apple currently allows publishers to post excerpts of their articles on the news app if they require users to subscribe to them. This way on clicking a link, readers are usually redirected to publisher’s websites for more. With a paywall in place, subscribed readers will not have to go publisher’s websites to read an article but would be able to do the same on Apple News.
Wall Street Journal, which posts a good number of its articles on Apple News, comes with a paywall which requires readers to bypass it if they wish to read its articles. As of October last year, as many as 40 million people were accessing news through the app according to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).
However, publishers have raised concern over the lack of information on the number of people who read their articles. Introducing a Paywall is part of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s effort of addressing publishers growing concerns over the number of people reading their articles.
