Apple to relaunch Texture magazine subscription service as soon as spring 2019

Apple “is preparing to relaunch Texture, an app it agreed to buy in March that offers unlimited access to about 200 magazines,” Gerry Smith reports for Bloomberg. “The company plans to make it a premium product within Apple News, which curates articles and comes preinstalled on iPhones, according to people familiar with the matter. A new version could be unveiled as soon as this coming spring, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.”
“Apple is trying woo newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and New York Times to join Texture and plans to refine its design, which currently creates an image of what magazines look like in print, the people said,” Smith reports. “Some changes have already been revealed. Over the summer, Apple switched to a single price for the service, instead of its former two-tiered plan that charged $5 more for weeklies like the New Yorker.”
“The Texture reboot will test whether the all-you-can-eat subscription model popularized by Netflix Inc. and Spotify Technology SA can work for news,” Smith reports. “While startups such as Magzter and Zinio already sell unlimited access to magazines for $9.99 a month, Apple is working on a higher-profile endeavor. After all, it will be promoted on some of the world’s most valuable real estate: the screens of more than 1.3 billion devices.”
‘The question now is whether Texture can achieve that kind of growth. The app had roughly 200,000 subscribers when Apple acquired it, a person familiar with the matter said,” Smith reports. “In 2015, the service paid out more than $15 million in revenue to publishers, which get compensated based on how much time readers spend with their articles.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. – Steve Jobs, January 2008
Of course, two years later, on January 27, 2010, Jobs introduced the iBooks Store.

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