Apple is paying publishers to unveil shows on Apple News first, reports DigiDay. News is a mobile app and news aggregator developed by Apple for iOS; it launched with the release of iOS 9.
It’s the successor to the Newsstand app included in previous versions of the operating system. Users can read news articles with it, based on publishers, websites and topics they select. (BTW, Apple, when are we going to get a macOS version of News?)
In April, BuzzFeed News premiered “Future History: 1968,” a documentary series that recaps major events that happened that year, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race between the U.S. and Russia to land a person on the moon. It released the first three episodes exclusively on Apple News, a week before uploading them to Facebook Watch, YouTube, Twitter and its own mobile app.
The Apple News launch was part of a deal in which Apple paid BuzzFeed for the first-window rights to the show’s first three episodes and cut BuzzFeed a share of the revenue from pre-roll ads that Apple sold against the episodes, Roxanne Emadi, head of audience development at BuzzFeed, told DigiDay.
The article says the deal epitomizes Apple’s push to get higher-quality, longer videos on Apple News, which 59.9 million people in the U.S. used in March, per comScore.
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