Publishers vs AI Scrapers, Cookie Chaos, the Battle for Reader Loyalty, and more...
Thanks to this month’s sponsor, pubX – the PubTech company using AI to help publishers squeeze more value from every impression. Its dynamic floor pricing engine empowers publishers to increase ad revenues by uniquely setting a price floor in each programmatic auction. Read our interview with pubX CEO, Andrew Mole.
Today’s Long Read is published by kind permission of Jim Bilton, one of Europe’s leading media analysts, and first appeared in the Wessenden Briefing newsletter. In this piece, Jim explores the battle for All-You-Can-Read, a model driving 55% of all digital subscription volumes globally, with Readly and Apple News+ slugging it out and Cafeyn running hard, but a lap behind.
I hope you had a good Easter, let’s jump in…
Google Officially Decides to Retain Third-Party Cookies in Chrome
The worst kept secret in media is now official, third-party cookies aren’t going anywhere. Another Big Tech pivot that lays waste to those publishers who have sunk $$ millions in creating alternate identifiers. P.S. We visited Cannes Lions in 2022 and all the ad execs told us the sunsetting of third-party cookies was a ‘ruse’ to stave off litigation and ‘would never happen’. And so it proved.
AI Scraper Violations: New Research Reveals Vast Scale of Problem
Analysis of 2,700 publishers who have robots.txt 'Disallow' directives showed their websites were still being accessed by 1,300 different bots. Allegedly (lawyer insertion), much of this content continues to surface in AI tools like Perplexity. Note: Only 15% of publishers are blocking Google's AI training tool, Google Extended. P.S. AI scrapers just don’t care…because they can get away with it.
Scroll.in’s ‘Smart Slider’ Lets Readers Choose Their Level of Detail
One of India’s most respected news publishers is allowing readers to control the depth of each story using a simple slider—from quick summaries to deep dives. The Gen AI user interface provides a high degree of personalisation in real time but still conforms to the editors’ intuition for what is relevant and important.
Alliance for Audited Media Launches Ethical AI Certification
This collaboration between AAM members offers an AI certification covering key areas including transparency & disclosures, AI policies & practices, human oversight & accountability, bias & fairness, and more. Created after studies revealed a trust gap between media companies and audiences over AI tools. Much needed and worldwide in scope.
Early Mover Advantage: What Publishers Need to Know About the Fediverse
The Fediverse is a decentralised, ad free, community-first ecosystem beloved by tech savvy Millennials. It is still a (very) niche play, just 1.25M users globally, but it offers a rare chance to build super loyal communities and distribute content on your own terms—successfully proven by 404 Media. The Conversation established a presence on the Fediverse but it has now 'paused it' - polite speak for given up. It's not for everyone.
FT Strategies Strategic Bet: AI-Powered Content Translation
Akshat Prakash, Camb.ai’s CTO, explains how AI content translation unlocks new audiences whilst significantly expanding content reach across multiple territories. He should know— Camb.ai translates content into over 140 languages including text-to-text and text-to-speech. Ever wanted to reach audiences in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city? Now you can.
APRIL UPDATE: The Leading AI Tools Every Publisher Needs to Know
A curated list across twenty media categories of the leading AI Tools, including the #1 solution in each category as of April 2025. When compared to our January list, what’s clear is that AI is becoming less about novelty and more about utility. P.S. Did we miss a new tool? Just hit reply and tell us.
Reclaiming the Ad Tech Reins: Mantis
Britain’s largest national and regional publisher, Reach plc, got tired with programmatic partners siphoning off revenue, prioritising scale over quality, and cutting them out of data loops. The result? They created their own solution which protects insights, data, and doubles down on curation. They’ve now made it commercially available for other publishers worldwide.
AI as Newsroom Detective: Mining Property Data for Stories
Born out of JournalismAI’s Collab Challenges, RealEstateAlerter is the product of a cross-border team including Code for Africa and MLive (USA). The result? An AI tool that scans massive datasets for unusual or high-value property deals, flagging them for human reporters to investigate further. A further sign that AI’s real power might lie behind the scenes...
JOIN WAITING LIST: Content Copyright Protection Using Blockchain
Writers’ Bloc is a content protection plugin that generates a unique digital fingerprint for every article, enabling a publisher to track and identify unauthorised copies—even if the text has been modified. Backed by blockchain, it creates an indestructible record of ownership, and importantly, legal proof against content theft. Explainer video below.
Gemini Can Now Turn Your Google Docs into Podcasts
Google’s Gemini can generate podcast-style audio summaries of your Google Docs. Aimed at improving content repurposing, the feature is part of a wider push to integrate Gemini tools across Workspace apps like Gmail. Key quote: “I used Gemini to generate one of these ‘podcasts’ based on an article I wrote and I’m not in a hurry to do it again.” The jury’s in. Wait a year.
AI TOOL OF THE WEEK: Direcqt empowers any publisher to build their own reader-facing AI products in minutes without writing a line of code. Over 100 publishers (including Vogue, ESPN, Front Office Sports, etc) use Direqt to replace their legacy site search with their own AI Search Engines, drive personalised conversations through their own AI Chatbot, and more. The result? Session duration increases of 67% and repeat visits goosed by 35%.
DIARY DATE #1: INMA World Congress of News Media, NYC | May 19-23
Returning to New York, this year’s INMA’s World Congress focuses on "How to Turn Ecosystem Chaos Into Media Opportunity" with an emphasis on strategies to navigate the current disruptions in the news industry. There’ll be plenty to talk about.
DIARY DATE #2: A Media Operator Summit, NYC | October 8-9
Hosted by Jacob Donnelly’s A Media Operator, this autumn’s summit will cover successful business models, the state of M&A, and how small media and events companies are adapting into 2026. Recently announced, 225 attendees expected.
The following feature is published with kind permission of one of Europe’s leading media analysts, Jim Bilton. It was first published in his Wessenden Briefing newsletter, which is written for C-Suite media decision makers – for further details or a sample newsletter, please contact: info@wessenden.com
The Battle for All-You-Can-Read
The major AYCR players now account for 55% of all digital subscription volumes. Is this good or dangerous? And what is happening in the battle between Readly and Apple News+?
The latest ABC figures show just how important digital magazines have become to many consumer magazine publishers. They also point to the growing share of All-You-Can-Read (AYCR) sales, which are dominated by two key players: the declining Readly and the growing Apple News+. This feature focuses on these two companies and what their dynamics reveal about this route to market.
The shape of the AYCR market
All-You-Can-Read (AYCR) operations are a subset of the much bigger DCDS (Digital Content Delivery Services) market, profiled in a FIPP report, authored by Wessenden (contact info@wessenden.com for a copy). This shows what a complex sector DCDS actually is and why it is so difficult to make “apples-with-apples” comparisons between companies. There are many local, country-specific operators, some publisher owned, in contrast to a handful of truly cross-border services. There are also many providers who specialise in closed-user operations (PressReader is a major player here) or in white-labelling rather than in creating consumer brands.
Yet in terms of international, open-market, branded AYCR operations, Readly and Apple News+ dominate, but with the troubled Readly continuing to be in ownership limbo and gradually deconstructing its business geographically in slow motion. By contrast, over the last two years, Apple has been pushing aggressively to grow its business.
How Readly and Apple News+ differ
Readly and Apple are coming at the AYCR market from very different directions…..
Readly’s strategy is to be a standalone platform for digital content consumption. Although it has gradually expanded its offer, moving from magazines into newspapers, adding article-level feeds and a growing audio dimension (both text-to-speech and full podcasts), its core is still to provide complete issues as digital replicas of the original print editions: essentially a shop for a large library of digital products.
By contrast, Apple News+ is using publisher content in a more dynamic way to drive user loyalty and engagement within its larger ecosystem, which is increasingly focused on ongoing subscription services rather than purely hardware sales. This means that it takes a more “atomising” approach, separating articles from complete issues and enhancing them with multimedia elements like animations, videos, and audio. The result is a very creative and typically Apple user experience. It does this across a much smaller range of publisher partnerships with big content brands, rather than trying to replicate the wide range of a magazine shop like Readly.
Essentially, it is the AYCR subscription mechanism that unites these very different operations.
The consumer pricing of AYCR
The standalone price of Apple News+ is £12.99 per month, although it reckoned that most paying customers have bought the service as part of the bigger Apple One Premier Plan bundle, which costs £36.95. This is a 37% discount when compared with buying each of the six services individually. Typically, Apple tends to discount by around 40% when it wraps its standalone services into a bundle.
Readly jumped from £7.99 per month to £9.99 during 2024 and has now moved up alongside Apple at £12.99. Readly claims that the £9.99 leap had little impact on their churn or acquisition figures, but it is rumoured that the £12.99 move is really hitting volumes and that this is now accepted as the ceiling price for the consumer offer.
Cafeyn remains at the lower £7.99 per month.
Customer file sizes
The free-to-access Apple News app comes preinstalled on all Apple devices. It has an estimated 14m active users in the UK (Source: Ipsos/Press Gazette) or 28% of the adult UK population. This puts the app narrowly in second place behind BBC News, which now has 14.2m users (+12% YoY). Apple News currently sees….
Its audience growing at +4% YoY.
Average time spent is 91 minutes per month (+6%).
Apple News users have to pay to access Apple News+, either as a standalone subscription (£12.99 per month) or as part of the Apple One bundle (see above).
The bundling of Apple News+ makes it very difficult to assess how many consumers have actually paid for the service, which also has extensive rolling free trial periods that further confuse the picture. Estimates for UK subscribers range wildly from under 250,000 up to several million. Wessenden’s own estimate is 600,000 in the UK, but possibly more than that when Apple One bundled subscribers are fully added in. This would suggest that around 4% of free Apple News users pay to access Apple News+.
Readly currently has approximately 100,000 paying subscribers in the UK out of a global total of 435,000.
Cafeyn claims 2.5m “users” worldwide, but these are a mix of free and paid, with a large proportion being white-labelled services for telecoms companies. The number of paying subscribers in the UK looks to be under 10,000.
Readly’s data shows that the average age of their UK subscribers is 54 on magazines and 58 on newspapers. Both are relatively old, suggesting that digital edition readers are quite similar to both print readers and tablet users.
Content inventory
Apple likes to work closely with a limited number of big, glossy brands, so keeps a very tight inventory of publisher content. This is “by invitation only”: there are only 250 UK magazine titles currently active, plus 750 in its other three operating regions, totalling 1,000 globally. This is in dramatic contrast to Readly’s worldwide inventory of 8,000 magazine and newspaper titles. Finding the optimum range (balancing the authority of a big inventory with a long tail of specialist titles against a streamlined user experience and big brand focus) is a balancing act that all physical retailers have too. It also means that Apple News+ is having a limited impact on the total magazine market outside the major publishers and their brands.
The metrics of e-reading
Apple is very tight-lipped about its Apple News+ usage statistics. By contrast, over the years, Readly has released snippets of data as to how their app is used. The dynamics have shifted as it has added to its inventory. It has made a big play in adding newspapers (both national and regionals) to its core magazine offer. It has an audio dimension (text-to-speech plus full publisher podcasts).