Why would Apple enshittify their News app in this way when there are so many legitimate advertisers out there? It seems obviously damaging to their brand, so it makes no sense to me.

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redserk 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I unsubscribed from the News app subscription over their decision to bake in ads.

I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.

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Forgeties79 10 hours ago | parent [-]

What’s wrong with the weather and stocks apps? Maybe a silly question.

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spudlyo 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The stocks app is essentially Apple Business News, with stock prices on one side. I'm not entirely sure how the weather app pushes News on you, but my guess is that it's there somewhere.

	▲	aembleton 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I quite like the weather app on my laptop. Not seen any ads or news in it yet.
	▲	Forgeties79 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		my stock app has the Apple business news towards the bottom where it’s pretty easy to ignore and I find it’s at least somewhat relevant, even if I don’t look at it. Even so, totally get it. I don’t really want ads there one way or another. I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)

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Y-bar 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Services Revenue must go up! If one ad network pays us 2% more use it!"

-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)

Actual quote from a few days ago:

> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”

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kotaKat 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m kind of (un)surprised to see it just be Taboola’s slop from the ages past. I forgot Taboola even still pushes that garbage.

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askl 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> legitimate advertisers

Those two words definitely don't belong together.

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mrweasel 10 hours ago | parent [-]

My local supermarket advertising on YouTube that they have a sale on coffee this week is pretty legitimate. It just doesn't buy the Alphabet shareholders a new yacht.

I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.

	▲	ACCount37 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News to generate ~70% of the profit Apple expects. Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold. This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money. Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
	▲	matwood 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A lot of that has moved to IG, where you can just follow the stores you're interested in directly. This shift is likely another move that hurt the 'traditional' advertiser pool.