If there’s one drawback to having newspapers and magazines on the iPad, we can all agree that the lack of a subscription model is the platform’s biggest red flag. But that appears to be changing very soon.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Apple is gearing up to make such an announcement in the coming weeks. Rather than the standard 70/30 split it looks as though Apple will take a cut from both subscriptions and ads.
Roger Fidler, head of digital publishing at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, thinks Apple take the standard 30 percent from subscriptions and as much as 40 percent from publishers’ advertising revenues. But it’s not a model that publishers are happy with, he said. Apple is also working on an “opt-in function” that would allow Apple to share vital tidbits about yourself with publishers, said Fiddler.