Apple News ads woes

Publishers still can’t make meaningful ad revenue from Apple News despite its push to sell more ad inventory. 

Apple News is an effective traffic referral source for many publishers, but the ad revenue continues to fall short. Revenue from Apple News has been “shockingly abysmal” in comparison to the audience the platform generates for one large news publisher, according to a publishing exec at that title, who spoke to Digiday under the condition of anonymity. 

They described revenue from Apple News ads in the “low hundreds of thousands a year, when it would be millions if it were [on-site] traffic.” They said they haven’t seen any kind of uplift since Apple News started selling its own ads on the platform. 

Apple News started selling its own ad inventory last November, in an attempt to drive revenue for the tech company and for publishers, Axios reported. Four publishing execs told Digiday that they haven’t seen a boost from this yet.

Apple News brings in a solid seven figures of revenue to the Guardian, representing just under 10% of the publication’s overall revenue, Jane Spencer, deputy editor and svp of strategy at the Guardian, said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado last week. But that’s a far cry from what it should bring in, given how much traffic Apple News is driving to the Guardian’s content, according to Spencer.

“Apple News is a high percentage of our traffic at this point,” Spencer said. However, “The terms are not as favorable for us as publishers who are on Apple News+,” she added. 

Apple News takes a 30% cut of revenue made from ads it sells within publishers’ articles. Apple News publishers get to keep all of the ad revenue they make from their content in the app. Digiday has previously reported that publishers get 50% of subscription revenue from Apple, which is calculated based on how much time subscribers spend with publishers’ content in a month.

The Hill’s director of audience development Sarakshi Rai said that while Apple News traffic has been “booming” in the past year — 23% higher in 2024 compared to 2023 — the revenue sharing model has been “quite conservative.” She declined to give specifics on how much ad revenue The Hill is getting from Apple.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Publishers do appreciate the steady subscription revenue they get from Apple News+. Gannett is one of the publishers monetizing both on the Apple News+ side and the free version, making Apple News one of Gannett’s “largest partners” of off-platform revenue and audience growth, according to a company spokesperson. But “it’s too early to tell” what Apple News selling ads directly will mean for revenue coming from the platform, they said.

Making money from Apple News has long frustrated publishers, due to issues such as advertisers’ disinterest in the inventory publishers are selling directly on the platform and limited user targeting (Apple is big on user privacy protection and doesn’t allow the use of third-party or IP addresses for targeting in Apple News). 

Publishers that rely on programmatic advertising won’t see a lot of ad revenue from Apple News either, given that it’s prohibited on the platform. Digital news publisher Salon’s advertising revenue comes from programmatic ads, and without a way to serve its own programmatic inventory, the monetization of Salon’s content on Apple News is “much less” than it gets from its own properties, according to general manager Amanda Wolfe. “Our audience on [Apple News] is definitely under-monetized,” she said.

Tim Hill, chief partnerships officer at IPG-owned ad agency Initiative, said none of his clients are spending on Apple News right now. Apple’s limited sales resources, no programmatic offering and the fact that news is a “hard sell” for advertisers right now means that Apple News just isn’t top of the list, he said. 

Digiday revealed Apple’s plans for a demand-side platform for programmatic bidding in 2022, but details still remain scarce.

“There’s a question of, how big of a priority is advertising to Apple?” Hill said. “Until they open the floodgates a little bit, it’s a little bit of a trickle in what their offering is.”

Rai added, “At the end of the day, it just depends on what Apple wants to do with Apple News.”

Other ways to make revenue on Apple News

Making money from content on Apple News through ads may not be a growing revenue stream for some publishers. But The Guardian and The Independent have found other ways to use the platform to support their businesses.

The Guardian has negotiated with Apple to put a widget at the bottom of its articles on the Apple News platform, which sends readers to the Guardian’s site to make contributions to the publisher. Apple doesn’t take a cut from those payments from readers, according to Spencer.

The Independent uses ad inventory on Apple News for its own marketing purposes, such as promoting its subscriptions and audio products, and sponsored content, according to Zach Leonard, chief operating officer at The Independent.

The Independent generated over half a billion additional pageviews on the Apple News platform last year. 

“Apple News has allowed us to generate additional revenue by extending our off-platform supply to advertisers,” Leonard said. He declined to share how much revenue the app is bringing in.

What we’ve heard

“We have not done a formal search to replace the CEO… There’s always a need to actually put someone at the helm. But this team is doing really well right now. Sometimes, if things aren’t broken, you shouldn’t try to fix things.”

— Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, speaking onstage at Digiday Publishing Summit about filling Cory Haik’s role as Refinery29 CEO after she left the company last year.

Numbers to know

$44 million: The amount the Guardian US expects to drive in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33% over last year.

10 years: The prison time Carlos Watson, co-founder of Ozy Media, was supposed to serve before President Trump commuted the sentence.

350%: The rate of increase for new paying members to Vox in the two months after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

25%: The percentage decrease of traffic to history website World History Encyclopedia when Google rolled out its AI Overviews feature in November.

What we’ve covered

Here’s our coverage of some of the onstage sessions at DPS, in case you couldn’t make it out to Vail:

• Dotdash Meredith enlisted OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product
• Publishers grapple with Q1 ad revenue challenges in a “buyer’s market”
• How Time evaluates and vets AI tools
• The Economist is looking beyond traffic to measure the success of its brand marketing push
• The BBC is raking in traffic after a website overhaul
• Why 1440 prefers CPMs for its newsletter business over other pricing models
• Fast Company and Inc. tighten up paywalls to grow consumer revenue amid traffic volatility

The Independent bets big on individual talent-led verticals

• The Independent is doubling down on talent-led media production as part of a plan to create valuable IP for sponsorship.
• The Independent’s new creators studio will produce a new crop of individual talent-led videos, newsletters and podcasts. 

Read more about The Independent’s foray into the booming creator economy here.

Publishers left guessing how Google’s March 2025 core update will reshape search 

• Another Google core update was completed last Friday, the first one this year — but what it will mean for publishers won’t be clear for a while, if at all.
• Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic – and they’re happening more often.

Read more about what these core updates mean for publishers’ search traffic here.

What does “curation” really mean for programmatic advertising?

• “Curation” is a term that means something different depending on who’s using it and what they’re selling. 
• Curation can give publishers more leverage, allowing them to layer in their own data, apply structure standards and secure more ad dollars from advertisers.

Read more about what curation really means for publishers here.

What we’re reading

Bloomberg’s experiments with using AI for articles summaries hasn’t gone smoothly

Bloomberg has corrected at least three dozen AI-generated article summaries this year, The New York Times reported. Bloomberg said it publishes thousands of articles a day and 99% of its AI summaries “meet our editorial standards.”

Legacy news orgs are grappling with threats from the Trump administration

News organizations like the AP and Axel Springer are figuring out how to navigate covering a second Trump administration, one that is more combative toward legacy media outlets, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The BBC will start up partnership talks with AI companies 

In the BBC’s annual published plan for the year, the publisher said it will open up talks with AI companies to find solutions for scraping of their content, Press Gazette reported. The BBC has not signed licensing or tech deals with any AI companies yet.

Newsrooms are struggling with growing news avoidance

Newsrooms are struggling with the epidemic of people wanting to avoid reading the news, The Guardian reported. Strategies like more personalization, story curation in newsletters, podcasts diving into a single topic and reducing article production are cropping up to tailor coverage to readers’ interests.

Court allows The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI to continue

A judge is allowing The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against AI tech company OpenAI to advance, according to The Hollywood Reporter. OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, though the judge did dismiss claims of unfair competition and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.