Apple News gives publishers the ability to broaden their reach with the Promote feature, which can promote up to six articles per Section in a 48-hour period. This helps boost article views by pushing promoted stories to the top of a Section within the publisher’s channel (Sections are like categories in Apple News). It also increases discoverability for those articles in recirculation areas around the app. 

We always recommend publishers make use of the Promote feature to maximise reach but the process is quite manual. It requires publishers to log into News Publisher and manually select articles they wish to Promote. Articles promoted in this way stay at the top of Sections for 48 hours to keep them fresh. This can make the process time-consuming for publishers to cycle through promote articles every two days.

At FlatPlan, publishers are always front of mind. So we’ve developed an automated system that enables publishers to utilise the Promote feature, without needing to allocate any time to do it. 

Our automated Promote feature will detect the best-performing articles each day from each of your publication Sections and automatically promote the top six articles per Section. This will help your stories reach a wider audience, drive up Average Active Time and amplify your publication’s presence on the Apple News app.

This boost in performance will strengthen your signal in the Apple News algorithm which can lead to a snowball effect where more and more readers will begin to discover your publication.

Get in touch with your support representative if you’d like this enabled on your channel. 

If you’re not currently using FlatPlan for your Apple News integration and would like access to bespoke features such as this (and many others), get in touch with the team to see how we can help grow your media business.