Publishers can now avoid paying the Apple tax for your apps PLUS Reach begins selling its AI content recommendation tool

July 26, 2022

As we highlighted last week, some 87% of people around the world now have a mobile device, and that revolution means that publishers have embraced apps as a way to serve their most engaged users. When I was running my own media consultancy, one client was seeing more than five times more engagement on their apps than on their websites based on pages per session.

However, one of the challenges for publishers has been Apple's 30% take from subscribers and how the tech company inserts itself in between subscribers and publishers, keeping a tight hold on user data. Strategically, that means that publishers have not had access to data that they need to drive their strategies, and it has also put another company in the middle of the relationship between publishers and their customers.

Now publishers can get around that by directing users to a website to subscribe rather than going through Apple's App Store. And Netflix is showing the way forward on how to use this path to subscribers.

AI is becoming an important technical tool for newsrooms of all sizes, LSE's Polis has noted. It is being applied to enhance content recommendation and also to create flexible paywalls that go far beyond the rigid dichotomies between hard and metered paywalls. Canada's Globe & Mail has been selling the tool that it created, Sophi AI, and now the UK's Reach is bringing a new AI tool to market, Neptune Recommender. They say that the tool has driven 40% of their page-view growth.

Plus:

  • Real-time analytics company Chartbeat has been bought by private equity - TechCrunch

  • The New York Times begins using live audio - New York Times

  • How the Washington Post topped 6m Instagram followers - AdWeek

  • More on Gloucestershire's SoGlos and its community-focused membership strategy - WNIP

  • Relationships are the secret to succeeding in product - Mind the Product

Following in the footsteps of Canada’s Globe & Mail who launched their in-house Sophi AI optimization and prediction engine to strong acclaim a few years ago, Reach plc, one of Britain’s biggest newspaper groups, is now offering its AI-powered audience engagement tool to fellow publishers. Called ‘Neptune Recommender’, the AI tool analyzes a website visitor’s …

News publishers can now direct iPhone app users to a website to subscribe — instead of being locked into Apple's system and Apple's rules. Netflix can show you how.

Chartbeat, a website that tells publishers about their readers, is getting the private equity treatment. Launched out of Betaworks in 2009, the service offered real-time analytics back when Google Analytics made you wait 24 hours to see who was clicking around your site. Eons later, private equity firm Cuadrilla Capital has swooped in to buy […]

The newsroom sees Twitter Spaces, a live audio platform on the social media app, as a staging ground. It might be less polished, “but it also has that reality.”

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Fifteen years old this year, SoGlos – covering Gloucestershire – claims to be the county’s leading regional media brand. Such has been its success, with 2020/21 being a record year, the publisher has now set its sights firmly on expanding into other local news markets throughout England, starting with Bristol. Launched from a garage in …

What is the secret to succeeding in the product management craft? In this podcast episode, we were joined by Enterprising Senior Product Manager, Ronke Majekodunmi to discuss how building relationships are a key asset to developing your product career, and how to master the art of developing alliances.