Apple, Just Bundle News+ Already
No one is buying it. And even if they were, it wouldn’t matter…
A tweetstorm was a-brewing, but I’ve been trying to write more (in longer than 280-character bursts), so I cut it short and jumped over here. On the topic of Apple News+…
This isn’t rocket science. It’s not any kind of science. It’s common sense. News+ was never going to work as a stand-alone subscription offering from Apple. With the news today of a key departure from the group, perhaps the company now sees that. But the writing has been on the wall from day one.
Part of the problem is counterintuitive. If anything, News+ is too good of a deal. There is simply too much content to consume for too low of a price that it’s a weird value equation in most peoples’ heads. The game is actually zero sum. The game is life and the metric is time. None of us have enough of it. But in the era of streaming TV (not to mention music and games and apps and everything else), we really don’t have enough of it.
I may have one magazine or newspaper that I love. Or maybe two or three. And maybe I’m happy to pay for each of those. And it’s awesome that News+ may have those packaged together for one low price, but it also has a basically infinite supply of other content to read. And reading isn’t watching. This isn’t Netflix or Amazon where more is obviously better. I know it may have seemed like it would be, that curation would be the key. But in the order of things, TV trumps magazines and newspapers. You may not like that, I may not like that, but this is the way.
So, what to do?
It’s so obvious that it’s already rumored. Make News+ a part of an Apple bundle. Yes, yes, “Apple Prime” as it were. Flip the script so that News+ isn’t yet another cognitive load on us. Something that may be a good deal but will I really have time for that? To: oh wow, this is included in what I already pay for? Awesome.
You know, the Amazon Prime playbook!
Would I pay for Prime Video as a stand-alone entity? Probably not. Don’t get me wrong, there is some good content — I’m a Jack Ryan sucker, even if season two was worse than season one — but is it better than Netflix or Disney+? No. But Amazon’s genius is in not making you make such a call.
Now, there’s a cost to this, of course. And it’s increasingly a high one! But relative to the size of these companies and the money they make from their core offerings (including, Prime, of course), it’s drops in a bucket. A very big bucket. And that’s for Hollywood-style video. For written content, it must be atoms from raindrops in the ocean.
So stop trying to sell News+, Apple. It’s literally not worth it to you. And while it is maybe worth it to us in dollar value, it’s not in time-value. So set it free. Which is to say, not actually free, but essentially free, by making it part of a larger bundle.
Yes, this is a little sad from a writer/former reporter perspective. But it’s reality. Facebook is starting to subsidize the news and other content, Apple can too via News+. And it can be goodwill for their users as well.
And such goodwill has a funny way of manifesting itself as churn reduction. Just ask Amazon. And this is something which services companies need to think about, especially as we creep towards the end of one year free trials…
