Advertising

Publishers can monetise their stories by filling ad placements on their Apple News channels and articles. Below, we explain the different ways of generating advertising revenue within Apple News - more information is available on the Apple website:

Direct Sold (100% of revenue): publishers retain 100% of revenue generated from ads they sell in their Apple News channel and individual stories. These ads have to be ‘direct’ ads rather than programmatic advertising – see Direct Sold information below.

Backfill (70% of revenue): if publishers enable backfill, which allows Apple to sell ads in their stores, they keep 70% of the revenue generated by these ads. Backfill will be automatically be switched on 48 hours after a publisher links their channel to App Store Connect.

Apple News+ publishers can select different backfill options for Free Users and Apple News + subscribers:

  • Turn ad backfill on or off.
  • Turn pre-roll video backfill on or off.
  • Turn outstream video backfill on or off.

If a publisher would rather sell their own ads exclusively, they may switch off backfill using Apple's 'Workbench' system.

Pooled (50% of revenue): publishers can earn additional revenue from ads that appear between their stories in the For You/Today feed (define), or Apple’s topic feeds (define). Apple shares 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. Revenue is allocated based on proportionate time spent by users with each channel’s articles.

Direct Sold information

Ads trafficked by publishers must be direct rather than programmatic. These ads can be trafficked using Apple’s Workbench system, or Google Ad Manager. Apple doesn’t issue any ad serving fees. You can find a guide to trafficking ads on Google Ad Manager here, and a guide to Workbench here.

Third Party Ad Tracking

Apple News supports secure image-based third-party impression and click tracking (e.g. 1×1 tracking pixels). JavaScript, iFrame or cookie-based trackers are not supported.

Publishers can use secure trackers from third party vendors to track impressions and clicks generated by lines, ads, or both. Campaign level tracking isn’t supported. Only viewable impressions can be tracked. More information on tracking can be found here.

Ad Formats and Inventory Locations

Here are the locations ads will be displayed:

  • For You/Today feed
  • Topic feeds curated by Apple News (e.g. Entertainment, Travel, Sports, etc.)
  • Digest/Spotlight
  • Publisher channels
  • Publisher articles
  • Swiping between articles and/or channels
  • Top Videos
  • Must-See Videos
  • News Widget on the Today View (available for interstitial video ads only)

More specifically, the following table outlines which ads can be displayed in which locations in Apple News:

Native Advertising

Publishers can deliver native content (also known as branded content, advertorial or sponsored content) to Apple News. Native stories will appear within a publishers stream of content and could be surfaced to users by taste.

Apple requests that publishers flag these stories up with a “Sponsored” tag when they are delivered to the system – at FlatPlan we support this functionality.

To boost reach for articles of this type Apple allows publishers to purchase “native ad units” or use their own in-article advertising units to drive traffic this way.