Apple Acquires the Digital Magazine Service Texture

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/03/12/apple-acquires-the-digital-magazine-service-texture/

It looks like Apple will be getting into digital magazine subscriptions with the acquisition of Texture, which provides its subscribers with access to several hundred magazines for a flat monthly fee. Apple was silent on its plans for the service.

Bloomberg is now reporting that Apple is planning to integrate Texture into Apple News and have a paid subscription.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-17/apple-is-said-to-plan-apple-music-like-news-subscription-service

With commentary from “Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst”… sigh. Wish journalists tracked peoples records…

I don’t know Gene personally since he’s too new to the Apple scene, but there was an article about him a few years ago when he left Piper Jaffray.

And they should have spoken to a “longtime Apple analyst” who has at least a clue about the publishing or the streaming entertainment business. This doesn’t make any sense at all:

"Repeating the success of the Beats deal with a Netflix for news will be difficult, according to Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and co-founder of Loup Ventures.,“People pay for music, they pay for video, and most news services are ad-supported,” he said. “If Apple launches this as a similar business to Texture, they likely won’t have many subscribers.”

If Mr. Fenster read any of the very extensive number of ad trade publications over the past months, he’d have seen some of the very extensive coverage about Apple testing with Doubleclick to expand ad sales in News.

https://digiday.com/media/apple-expands-test-sell-ads-apple-news/

I posted this to the list yesterday, but I sent it to the wrong addy:

An Apple News/Texture combo seems to have Google and Facebook really spooked:

https://digiday.com/media/google-rolls-new-subscription-tool-mcclatchy-newspaper-sites/

Virtually magazine loses a lot of money on print subscription and newsstand sales and the costs of paper, postage, printing, shipping, distribution and customer acquisition keep going up and up. The costs of maintaining a website and acquiring online subscribers aren’t cheap. Optimizing for mobile devices adds extra cost, and mobile ad adjacencies for mobile advertisers are a whole other can of worms. Facebook’s shift away from publisher content in Newsfeed made the scenario even worse. Most probably Texture was started by a group of the biggest magazine publishing companies because they needed any penny they could get.

I haven’t read anything about how much Apple paid for Texture, and I think it probably wasn’t much of anything at all. Certainly it was nothing remotely resembling what it paid for Beats. If Apple plays its cards right, it has a lot to gain from this purchase, and the publishers have nothing to loose. They are already sharing revenue with the ads that appear News, as well as with anything from the Doubleclick test + subscriptions and merchandise from the Apple Store and iBooks. I’ll bet Apple will put together attractive pricing structures for their services, including something with the not-so-secret streaming video service.

Tim Cook and the late, lamented Steve Jobs repeatedly stressed how important services would always be to Apple’s hardware sales. This shebang could make services even better.

Marilyn

Which reminds me. Is anyone still quoting Rob Enderle about Apple? He has
about a 0% success rate with Apple predictions and has (or had) huge
conflicts of interest that made him anything but an independent analyst.