All You Can Eat Publishing

Lessons on how to choose your lunch partners carefully

This week many in the news and mag industry published their circulation figures, known as “The ABCs”. An ABC number is a measure of edition circulation and was once the single most important number in a publishing company. It dictated your competitive position, your bonus payments and the length of your lunch plans.

It has lost its primacy to digital targets, but it still has a place on the list of ‘metrics that matter’ for multichannel publishers. Many magazines and news brands were delighted this week to report numbers that were in growth.

For many the driver of that was digital editions in “All you can eat” subscriptions, which is circulation code for services like Apple News who sell bundled subscriptions to consumers, but pay publishers on readership of their specific titles, allowing them to claim an audited paid edition.

The success of Apple News as a publishing platform is a silent slightly shadowy story in news and mag publishing, quietly accumulating since it launched in 2015. It doesn't publish many numbers but likely has 120m+ users and 20m+ paying subscribers, which should generate over ￡2bn in annual recurring revenue (depending on internal bundling and discounting approach).

It has hundreds of titles, but not all - many have not signed up because the decision to work with a perceived competitor is not an easy one. Firstly this is because aggregators by nature concentrate customer and advertiser power, and commoditise suppliers - it’s in their model design blueprint.

Publishers create specific content and distribute it on their owned platforms to their specific customers. Aggregators take all the content and distribute it to all the customers. Over time customers are trained that the easiest place to discover, read, comment on and share content is the aggregator platform. Aggregators sit across the table from you and they look awfully like they are going to eat your lunch.

Despite that, I’ve been a supporter of partnering with Apple when working both with The Times and at Bauer Media, because the benefits still outweighed the risks. We evaluated that around four main factors.

• Does it get our content to audiences that we otherwise could not reach?
• Does it generate meaningful revenue that we otherwise would not get, net of revenues we might lose in substitution?
• Is the partner trustworthy and will they create brand value in ways that outperforms our own marketing investments?
• Is the partner reliable, and can we get out of it if our evaluation case turns out to have been wrong?

Apple News scores highly on these factors. It has vast reach in the US, Canada and Australia, all English language markets where British publishers can compete. It has a clear revenue share model that is tied to performance and relatively transparent, and publishers are making significant revenues.

Apple are keen to promote mastheads and branded specials, and they protect the environment of Apple News - there is no user generated content, very light ad load, quality publishers and it might be the best magazine reading experience on mobile yet. And it can be left easily - the New York Times exited in 2020 to focus on direct readers only and seems to have managed ok.

So far Apple have been steady and reliable partners, and a good case study of an aggregator acting as an incremental channel generating reach and revenue.

They don’t always work out that way. Compare that to the journey of Google as a partner to the publishing industry. It started out as an aggregator for search, trading indexing for traffic. During the early stages of digitisation in the industry, the decision to sign up to Google as a hungry competitor to the Yahoo and AOL portals was an easy one.

But how does it pass the same evaluation today? Google increasingly aims to be a destination for clickless searches and AI overviews. It doesn’t share revenue and is less a partner to publishers so much as a monopoly rent collector that must be paid to retain access to the internet. Its market dominance prevents viable exit strategies - could any serious publisher switch to only index with Duck Duck Go? Google has moved to full Lunch Eating mode.

Today we are applying these same tests to the emerging AI players, with their array of LLMs, Generative Search tools and Agents. Many seem not only to want to eat your lunch but also to raid your larder to feed their models too.

This market is evolving fast. Business models and consumer products are emerging, and many choices still need to be made, which in turn will define what kind of partnerships might be possible for publishers.

AI tools could be designed to attribute content to content creators, or not. Developers could licence content that is used for training or augmentation, or try to avoid it. They could seek to partner with publishers, or not. Publishers should be able to protect their copyrights, but in the worst case they may not.

I am increasingly optimistic that a strain of AI players will emerge who look more like Apple News than late stage Google. There should be a virtuous circle here - a serious, reliable partner for publishers should be able in turn to secure the most reliable content for training and product development, if the market incentives work as they should.

Perhaps we’ll see AI circulation coming through in next year’s ABCs? If they get that through the audit committee, lunch is on me.

This post was previously published on Substack at https://substack.com/home/post/p-157448832 . Subscribers to Substack get all posts first, free and directly to their inbox. Sign up at https://substack.com/@chrisduncania