Apple News is now more popular than the BBC (app)

Apple News is now more popular than the BBC news app in the UK, according to the latest research from publishing industry audience researchers, Ipsos iris. It means that in December, more people turned to Apple for their news fix than used the BBC.

Apple represents diverse opinion

While it’s not really a fair competition – Apple is able to represent the full diversity of media opinion, while the BBC is stuck with its own weird editorial guidelines – but this does show how a myriad of media have entered public consumption.

More people than ever before now, quite sensibly, seek news from various channels and then attempt to synthesize a more accurate picture of reality using the different views available in the UK’s narrowing Overton Window.

I think the Apple News team will take heart at the data.

It shows that 27% of all internet users aged over 15 made use of the app –13.2 million in all. Meanwhile just 12.5 million people made us of the BBC News app they are still forced to pay for.

The two services dominate the sector.

Even Google News only had an audience of 1.6 million the report claims. (The latter sounds incredibly low, and I suspect means sessions of news consumption via the browser isn’t counted, which may undermine the substance of the data).

Disambiguation of the channel

What I think the information does show is that there is a big appetite for a news aggregation service that gathers stories from across the media but that also provides something like a sustainable business for those it curates.

That, at least, is what Apple News is attempting to achieve within its ‘Plus’ tier – though some believe it still has some way to go. In 2021, Apple did move to improve the experience with its News Partner Program.

The BBC still has mind share – people spent 2.2 billion minutes exploring its content in December, while Apple News grabbed 1.2 billion minutes of attention.

Apple users are engaged users

What makes this remarkable, of course, is that most people in the UK aren’t using Apple devices, which implies that those who are on such devices are among the most digital engaged audiences in the UK. Which kind of echoes what many already believe in terms of platform engagement in digital experiences.

Turning to December’s data for the UK’s top online properties, Apple sits in eleventh place with 32.7 million adults turning to the site. Alphabet leads with 49.8 million, followed by Meta (48.6m) and Amazon 46m. The BBC sits in fifth position with 39.8 million. The UK.gov site achieves 33.6 million, the data claims.

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