Some Publishers Are Seeing Significantly Increased Traffic From Apple News ⇥ niemanlab.org

Really interesting article from Ricardo Bilton at Nieman Lab:

Alongside the launch of iOS 10 in September, Apple announced a handful of updates to Apple News, which it launched last fall. Along with some cosmetic changes like a new logo and typeface, the new version of the app brought some much-needed features for publishers, including breaking news notifications and support for paid subscriptions. But for many publishers, the most welcome change was to the traffic it gives publishers, which has grown in a big way.

CNN, for example, says its Apple News content got 36.5 million unique readers in September, a major increase from August’s 5 million. Its pageviews also increased significantly to 274 million, up from 43 million a month before.

Those are some pretty astonishing figures. Other publishers are reporting similarly huge gains, while others are seeing flat traffic. Apple says that News now has 70 million users, which seems pretty good for a news aggregator app only available in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. I have no doubt that the figures are somewhat inflated by this hyperbolic U.S. election season; I’m interested to see how Apple News fares post-election.