Apple News+ ranking: Circulation growth slows across top 25 US magazines

People magazine still tops the ranking, but has seen its readership on the app fall.

The growth of Apple News+ appears to be slowing, new circulation figures obtained by Press Gazette suggest.

The top 25 titles on Apple’s premium news aggregation service had a combined circulation of 1,333,088 in the first half of 2022, according to a ranking provided by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM).

This is up 6% year-on-year from the first half of 2021, when the top 25 had a combined circulation of 1,254,802.

But the total has fallen 18% from the second half of last year when top 25 AN+ circulations totalled 1,622,823.

AN+ circulations are calculated by the AAM using average unique opens per issue of a magazine.

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The top 25 magazines for each period differs slightly, meaning that many individual titles in the current top ranking increased their circulations significantly despite the wider trend.

Every Apple News+ ranking published by Press Gazette has so far been topped by showbiz magazine People. But the title saw its AN+ readership tumble in the first half of this year.

Between the first half of 2021 and the first half of 2022, People’s average weekly AN+ circulation fell 36% from 165,000 to 105,000. People’s AN+ circulation topped 200,000 in the second half of 2021.

Vanity Fair (-13%), National Geographic (-6%) and Popular Mechanics (-12%) are among the other top-performing titles to have seen their AN+ circulations fall.

Other top ten magazines – Men’s Health, New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, Women’s Health and Wired – saw their AN+ circulations increase over the same period.

New entrants to the top 25 list for the first half of 2022 (below) included Rolling Stone, Fortune and Architectural Digest.

Apple launched News+, a paid-for version of its free aggregation app, in 2019. It is home to content from around 200 publications, most of them magazines, but also some newspapers. The product costs $9.99 a month in the US but is also available through the Apple One bundle.

Apple has not released any News+ subscription data. Analysts at Cowen reportedly estimated in 2021 that the service could reach 19 million subscribers by 2023. The AAM figures, while not providing a total figure, suggest this forecast is not realistic.

Below is the AAM’s top 25 ranking.

Topics in this article : Apple

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William Turvill

@wturvill

William Turvill is associate editor (interviews and investigations) for Press Gazette and is also a media correspondent for The New Statesman. Before joining the company, William was a business correspondent for The Mail on Sunday and chief reporter of City A.M. He is a former Paul Foot Award finalist, was shortlisted for writer of the year at the 2022 PPA Awards, and was a gold winner at MHP's 30 Under 30 Awards in 2018.