Apple has been fairly guarded about its News app, to the point it won’t even reveal to publishers how many readers see content there. Now, it’s opening the platform up to just about everyone.
With an update to its publishing protocols, Apple will let anyone push content to News, making it a catch-all reader service — just as Facebook recently did with Instant Articles. Everything from video posts to straight-up blog submissions can be added.
This is coming via a new Web-based editing portal, where Apple is focussing on smaller media entities and independent publishers. It’s hoping those beyond its launch partners and larger publishers will make a home on Apple News.
That new portal, called News Format, will allow users to create content once, which will be recursive on all iOS devices. It also links to existing content management solutions, though Apple doesn’t specifically name them.
This is not a wider rollout of the News Publisher feature Apple made available when News launched. The News Publisher has been in beta since launch, and has yet to accept anyone beyond Apple’s partners for News — but is getting a new analytics dashboard for publishers. This will allow those pushing content to Apple News a glimpse at the aforementioned stats Apple has been quiet about like unique viewers, total views, shares, likes and average reading time.
This also comes on the back of native advertising for Apple News, where ads can be skinned to look like native blocks of content.
➤ News Publisher [Apple]
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