The New Ecology 33
Even before the arrival of the app, newspaper and magazine publishers had been looking excitedly towards the new device as the one that
would be suitable for their digital content, with The Economist referring to it as the “tablet of hope”.
87
Problems soon began to emerge, however. Much of the commentary
initially was due to Apple’s slicing off 30 per cent of subscriptions as it
did with all digital sales, but in many respects, this simply duplicated
distribution models for physical copies and was less important to those
involved in the publishing industry. More significantly, by failing to understand the media ecology of magazine and newspaper publishing and
by seeking to replace it with the much simplified ecosystem of iOS, Apple
reduced the scope for publishers to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the iPad. First of all, by imposing strict terms, Apple
stopped publishers from striking other deals with existing subscribers,
a common tactic to promote sales whereby publishers willingly took a
loss in the first year so as to be able to recoup those losses via renewals. As well as preventing publishers from approaching readers directly,
thus severing the ties between them for future direct marketing and the
collection of information, Newsstand began to look less and less appealing to the newspaper and magazine industries. The launch of the
iPad itself had led to a spike in subscriptions, a growth of 268 per cent
for Condé Nast, for example, by the end of 2011,
88
but that boost was
already declining when Newsstand appeared and in 2015, disappointed
by declining interest among users, Apple removed the app from version 9
of iOS. As Glenn Fleishman observed, “after some fanfare, and major
publications adopting the Newsstand format… Apple more or less left
it to rot.”
89
The failure of Newsstand did not mark the complete end of Apple’s
engagement with journalism via iOS. News replaced Newsstand in iOS
9, and effectively worked as an aggregator for different news feeds, similar to applications such as Flipboard, which created mobile magazines
from multiple sources. With News, however, Apple no longer held out
promises to monetise in any innovative shape or form. Being the richest
company in the world was not enough for Apple to revolutionise journalism: while the iPad was vastly more successful than the Viewtron
terminal, the demise of Newsstand indicated some of the ways in which
a thriving media ecology is very different to a digital ecosystem in the
ways in which the main big tech companies attempt to define it. As we
shall see in a later chapter, while it is possible for an organisation such
as Amazon to, effectively, subsidise a part of the journalism industry,
none of the Big Five tech companies – individually or together – is able
to completely support the production of global media. More than that,
their history over the past decade, as we shall see in the next chapter,
has been more closely aligned to the disruption of the funding of media
through advertising rather than the creation of news.
Even before the arrival of the app, newspaper and magazine publishers had been looking excitedly towards the new device as the one that
would be suitable for their digital content, with The Economist referring to it as the “tablet of hope”.
87
Problems soon began to emerge, however. Much of the commentary
initially was due to Apple’s slicing off 30 per cent of subscriptions as it
did with all digital sales, but in many respects, this simply duplicated
distribution models for physical copies and was less important to those
involved in the publishing industry. More significantly, by failing to understand the media ecology of magazine and newspaper publishing and
by seeking to replace it with the much simplified ecosystem of iOS, Apple
reduced the scope for publishers to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the iPad. First of all, by imposing strict terms, Apple
stopped publishers from striking other deals with existing subscribers,
a common tactic to promote sales whereby publishers willingly took a
loss in the first year so as to be able to recoup those losses via renewals. As well as preventing publishers from approaching readers directly,
thus severing the ties between them for future direct marketing and the
collection of information, Newsstand began to look less and less appealing to the newspaper and magazine industries. The launch of the
iPad itself had led to a spike in subscriptions, a growth of 268 per cent
for Condé Nast, for example, by the end of 2011,
88
but that boost was
already declining when Newsstand appeared and in 2015, disappointed
by declining interest among users, Apple removed the app from version 9
of iOS. As Glenn Fleishman observed, “after some fanfare, and major
publications adopting the Newsstand format… Apple more or less left
it to rot.”
89
The failure of Newsstand did not mark the complete end of Apple’s
engagement with journalism via iOS. News replaced Newsstand in iOS
9, and effectively worked as an aggregator for different news feeds, similar to applications such as Flipboard, which created mobile magazines
from multiple sources. With News, however, Apple no longer held out
promises to monetise in any innovative shape or form. Being the richest
company in the world was not enough for Apple to revolutionise journalism: while the iPad was vastly more successful than the Viewtron
terminal, the demise of Newsstand indicated some of the ways in which
a thriving media ecology is very different to a digital ecosystem in the
ways in which the main big tech companies attempt to define it. As we
shall see in a later chapter, while it is possible for an organisation such
as Amazon to, effectively, subsidise a part of the journalism industry,
none of the Big Five tech companies – individually or together – is able
to completely support the production of global media. More than that,
their history over the past decade, as we shall see in the next chapter,
has been more closely aligned to the disruption of the funding of media
through advertising rather than the creation of news.