Apple News+ Landed 200,000 Subscribers In Its First 48 Hours

When Apple announced its Apple News+ service last month many wondered how successful the the new subscription platform would be. On the surface giving access to over 300 publications for $9.99 monthly sounded like a good deal. Some big-name publications were part of the agreement including Time and Car & Driver among others. Some numbers have now surfaced for News+ subscribers, and it appears that Apple has done quite well.

A report claims that during the first 48-hours the service was available it racked up over 200,000 subscribers. Apple News+ has a free one month trial before the monthly charges set in to allow users to see if they like the service. That naturally brings the question of how many of the 200,000 subscribers will stick around after the free trial is over.

Apple News+ is modeled after the Texture service that Apple acquired in 2018. Texture is a subscription news service that had access to 200 publications. Apple has improved on that with News+ offering 300 publications including newspapers and magazines. Apple intends to end the Texture service next month and port those subscribers over to News+. Exactly how many subscribers Texture has is a mystery; an estimate from CEO John Loughlin from 2016 claimed "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers.

The Motley Fool pointed out that if all 200,000 subscribers Apple gathered in the first 48 hours registered, Apple would rake in $24 million annually before the publishers take their cut. That is a lot of money, but when you consider Apple generated $265 billion in the last year, $24 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.

Apple's big opportunity is seen as luring in the vast number of iPhone users to join the service. iPhone users consume lots of news, the Apple News app on the devices is the top news app out there with users reading over 5 billion articles monthly on the app. A small percentage of those users moving to the paid News+ app would mean big money for Apple.