In the latest progress-with-caveats, Apple is allowing publishers to sell digital subscriptions from inside the Apple News app, giving them access to a much larger potential subscriber base. But that’s hedged around, as always, by constraints intended to maintain consumer privacy — and Apple’s control over access to them. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, a number of big publishers are already signed on to sell subs from within the News App, using the new feature available in iOS 10, which resurrects a capability from Apple’s old Newsstand.
The list includes the WSJ itself as well as The Washington Post, The Economist, National Geographic, Time Inc. publications including Time and People, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
Like most of its other content sales arrangements, Apple will take 30% of the subscription sales revenue under the new program, then 15% of all subsequent renewals.