Apple News+ Has a Distracting Amount of Ads
Recently, on the BasicAppleGuy blog (Internet Archive) about Apple News+ (which, despite the sound of this blockquote, he actually does like):
The amount of ads embedded inside Apple News is unhinged, and it’s not uncommon for any 5-minute article to have 5-6 inline ads between every third paragraph, ranging from advertisements for horrifying skin conditions to embedded videos that autoplay while I’m reading. And with no reader view or effective way to block this content, the ads can go a long way towards ruining the experience.
I wanted to like News+, and still hop in there for the occasional article or mindless scroll, but the ads situation is grating. It’s a surprising dissonance coming from the company who is dead-set on disrupting the digital adverting industry. If it wasn’t included in the Apple One bundle, I wouldn’t renew News+.
On the other hand, if they were revamp the service and introduce a fully ad-free tier (which was also somehow fair to publishers), I could see myself gravitating to Apple News to read outside of the usual sources I get via RSS.
This would likely need to be at a higher price than the standard $9.99/month that News+ costs on its own right now. Keeping track of readership so that publishers get paid appropriately despite removing ads would be a big undertaking, but couldn’t be that different from what YouTube does for its YouTube Premium service.
To get a more favorable view of Apple News+, check out the full article on the BasicAppleGuy blog.