Apple News business chief has stepped down less than a year after launching Apple News+, a subscription service that has struggled to attract subscribers.
The Apple News+ subscription service brings together over 300 popular magazines, leading newspapers and digital publishers into curated experience within the Apple News app. Available in the U.S. and Canada, Apple News+ presents the best and most relevant articles to meet any range of interests from publications such as Vogue, National Geographic Magazine, People, ELLE, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
Mark Gurman and Gerry Smith for Bloomberg:
Liz Schimel, the outgoing executive, joined in mid-2018 after serving as the president of international business at magazine publisher Conde Nast, said people familiar with the move who asked not to be identified discussing personnel matters. At Apple, Schimel oversaw relationships with advertisers and news publishers…
News is a key part of Apple’s shift to subscription services as it tries to squeeze more revenue from customers. The company introduced Apple News in 2015 as an app to aggregate stories from a variety of sources and added a $10 monthly subscription last March…
In addition to subscriptions, Apple News generates revenue from advertising inside the app, which runs on nearly all Apple devices. The company said in January that the Apple News app is used by 100 million people a month in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and U.S., but it didn’t disclose the number of paying customers, as it has done for Apple Music.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in mid-December, “Of all of Apple’s services, the one that would benefit most from an ‘Apple Prime’ bundle would be Apple News+.”