The Daily Mail has claimed it has been “arbitrarily” excluded from joining Apple News and the paid service Apple News+ in the UK.
The publisher described Apple’s decision as “a classic example of arbitrary and exclusionary conduct by a market-dominant business”.
It said it was harmed by being excluded because improvements in ad monetisation from Apple News means “having access to that platform is as indispensable to an online news business as having access to Apple’s App Store or Google Search”.
The Daily Mail’s publisher DMG Media, which also publishes Metro, The i Paper and The New Scientist, made the complaints about Apple in a submission to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
The CMA has proposed to designate the tech giant as having strategic market status by using its own operating systems, app distribution and browsers to favour its own apps and services.
This would enable the CMA to impose conduct requirements or propose pro-competition interventions.
Apple News is one of the biggest news apps in the UK, with an audience of 14.5 million in June – narrowly behind BBC News on 14.8 million, according to Ipsos iris. The Daily Mail’s app had an audience of 1.4 million.
Daily Mail in the US was a launch partner for the Apple News aggregator app, which curates top stories and is included by default on Apple devices, in the US in 2015, meaning it produced content specifically for the platform along with other publishers like The Guardian, The New York Times and Conde Nast.
DMG said Daily Mail was a recent arrival in the US at that time and “needed to grow traffic”, but that being on Apple News produced “extremely disappointing” results.
“Not only was there no revenue, because there was almost zero fill of ad slots, but other promises Apple had made, such as basic traffic reporting, were not delivered.
“Also, their editorial team was actively working to reduce our promotion to users, because we were ‘winning’ on a great many topics and subjects – too many as far as their human curators were concerned.”
The publisher therefore decided that Daily Mail would not join Apple News when it launched in the UK later that year.
It explained: “This was to avoid the risk of Apple News cannibalising the Daily Mail’s high-quality traffic, in particular on its iOS app. This risk did not apply to Metro [as] there was little traffic on the Metro app.”
Newer DMG newsbrands like Metro, The i Paper and Daily Mail Australia are on the platform, while New Scientist is on the paid-for Apple News+ subscription service in the UK, US and Australia.
Daily Mail ‘turned down’ for Apple News in UK multiple times since 2022
By 2022, DMG said, it had decided Daily Mail in the UK should join Apple News but that it has since been turned down multiple times.
It changed its mind because, it said, “given the importance of iOS users to advertisers and the privileged position of Apple News and Apple News + within the iOS mobile ecosystem, not being a participant in Apple News is no longer an option – it has become indispensable to running a successful online news publishing business”.
It noted that “a decade of self-preferencing is beginning to pay off and Apple News’s traffic figures have risen significantly”, with traffic from Apple News to Daily Mail in the US jumping up from 18 million monthly views in July 2024 to almost 80 million in June this year.
DMG said the issues with monetisation in Apple News had also been fixed, with “steady improvement” in revenue per 1,000 ad impressions.
Total Apple News revenue across DMG Media in 2024 was £625,000 (of which 38% was from the Daily Mail despite not being on the platform in the UK) while this is expected to rise by 156% this year to £1.6m (with a 233% increase at the Daily Mail).
Although the onboarding process started, in October 2023 it was told it was “shifting resources to Apple News+ and would no longer onboard us or other news publishers who were not already members of Apple News.
“We were told to check back in early 2024 as onboarding might then be resumed. In July 2024 we noticed that The News Agents had launched on Apple News UK and inquired again about resuming onboarding. We were told initially that our submission was being reviewed by Apple in the US, then that Apple was only onboarding smaller publications.”
The publisher said its last “major meeting” with Apple was in February this year and that it was again told that Apple News is “not onboarding many publications”.
“The main reason given was that Apple only wanted to add partners which would grow the pie, and did not want to take share away from existing partners. We were also told, paradoxically, both that the number of articles we publish and the strength of our user engagement would overwhelm Apple’s ecosystem…”
The publisher said it was told it could not join Apple News+, which costs £12.99 per month, because not enough Daily Mail content is behind a paywall, although it now produces around 30 articles a day which are available only to more than 325,000 paying Mail+ subscribers.
DMG continued: “Apple has made no cogent case for excluding DailyMail.co.uk from the ‘club’ it operates beyond its claim that it would dilute revenue for other members.”
Daily Mail publisher: App revenue ‘seriously depressed’ by privacy changes
DMG said the Daily Mail’s iOS app on Apple devices makes up 36% of all its page views but brings in just 4-5% of total revenue.
DMG said revenue from the app has been “seriously depressed by the discriminatory effect” of the introduction in June 2021 of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) which prompts users to opt out of having their Identifier For Advertisers ID being tracked across apps.
DMG complained that Apple forces app developers to present the prompt “with a design and wording they had created” unlike on the web when websites often highlight the value of being able to show personalised advertising, for example by explaining that it funds their journalism.
The publisher said that this change “meant the percentage of users who agree to be tracked (consent) was heavily reduced” and this meant CPMs (revenue per 1,000 impressions) and yield per visit “dropped dramatically, because advertisers would not buy ads that could not be targeted”.
This resulted in a 53% year-on-year decline in revenue from the Daily Mail iOS app, from £4.7m in December 2020 to May 2021 before the iOS 14.5 upgrade, to £2.2m in December 2021 to May 2022.
Consent to ad tracking (IDFA availability) for the Daily Mail iOS app fell from almost 70% to 30% in June 2021 and remains below 25%.
This meant ad revenue from the app fell from £29,000 a day in June 2021 to £12,500 a day in June 2022 and averaged £8,200 a day throughout 2023 and 2024.
DMG said it estimates its iOS app revenues are now “tens of millions of pounds lower than they would otherwise have been”.
Apple has been contacted for comment.
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