Apple Lowers Commission on In-App News Purchases

Apple is launching a new program that will allow subscription news organizations that participate in the Apple News app and meet certain requirements to lower their commission rate to 15 percent on qualifying in-app purchases taking place inside their apps on the App Store. Typically, Apple's model for subscription-based apps involves a standard 30 percent commission during their first year on the App Store, which then drops to 15 percent in year two. But the new Apple News Partner Program, announced today, will now make 15 percent the commission rate for participants starting on day one. There are a few caveats to this condition, and they benefit Apple. To qualify, the news publisher must maintain a presence on Apple News and they have to provide their content in the Apple News Format (ANF). The latter is the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that's used to create articles for Apple News which are optimized for Mac, iPhone and other Apple mobile devices. Typically, this involves a bit of setup to translate news articles from a publisher's website or from their CMS (content management system) to the supported JSON format. For WordPress and other popular CMS's, there are also plugins available to make this process easier. Meanwhile, for publishers headquartered outside one of the four existing Apple News markets -- the U.S., U.K., Australia or Canada -- they can instead satisfy the program's obligations by providing Apple with an RSS feed. On the App Store, the partner app qualifying for the 15 percent commission must be used to deliver "original, professionally authored" news content, and they must offer their auto-renewable subscriptions using Apple's in-app purchase system.