Apple is scaling up its plans to expand its News app to new countries beyond the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Apple reportedly plans to build locally focused news coverage in the United Kingdom, while also offering its popular puzzles section to countries in addition to where it is already available, which is the United States and Canada.
Both Apple News and Apple News+, the app’s free and subscription-based versions, respectively, offer a blend of curated and personalized content, including content from magazines and newspapers, in addition to games, podcasts, and newsletters. The free service is ad-supported, while the subscription service costs $12.99 a month in the US and £12.99 in the UK.
Apple News currently reaches about 125 million people every month and feeds into the company’s services business, which is collectively worth about $96 billion a year.
Apple’s move comes as we’re seeing significantly falling as revenue across media sites, as Meta has made the decision to downplay news coverage, while Google has made changes to its search algorithms, decreasing sites’ traffic from Google Search and offering AI summaries of search and news results.
As reported by FT, Apple’s research shows that Apple News readers offer a different audience of readers than most publishers. Apple’s audience is more affluent, said one media boss, adding that it was “well read in the corridors of power in Westminster and Washington.”
So far, the impact of Apple News has been hit or miss, with some publishers reporting significant business through the platform. However, Apple’s strict data protection rules preventing advertisers from targeting readers using third-party data or IP addresses have made publishers’ attempts to monetize articles more difficult.