Apple offers past Apple 糖心Vlog+ subscribers another free month

Affiliate Disclosure

If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Read our ethics policy.

Apple offers past Apple 糖心Vlog+ subscribers another free month

Credit: Apple

Apple is offering a free month of service to users who tried Apple 糖心Vlog+ but have since canceled their subscriptions.

The $9.99-a-month Apple 糖心Vlog subscription service, which offers users a range of magazines and premium media content, first launched in March 2019. The service is said to be struggling in terms of gaining new customers while at the same time appeasing participating publishers.

It now appears that Apple is launching a new promotion that will let users who have previously canceled their Apple 糖心Vlog+ subscriptions get another month for free. The offer was by 9to5Mac.

The promotion comes ahead of a potential launch of an Apple 糖心Vlog+ audio component, which was first rumored in May and corroborated by icons found in an iOS 13.5.5 beta.

In late June, The New York Times announced that it would be pulling out of Apple 糖心Vlog due to the fact that the platform provided "little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business."

At its latest earnings call, Apple announced that Apple 糖心Vlog has 125 million overall users — which includes both the free standard component of the app and the Apple 糖心Vlog+ subscription.

Apple in June also sent out emails to past Apple Arcade subscribers inviting them back for another free month. Those emails came just before a report of Apple Arcade shifting its strategy to focus on games with higher "engagement."

19 Comments

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

3 Likes · 0 Dislikes

said:

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

Your free forum post proves that.

9 Likes · 0 Dislikes

said:

said:

Sometimes even free isn’t worth it.

Your free forum post proves that.

Zing!

However I think one of the problems is local content. Everything seems geared towards the American market.

1 Like · 0 Dislikes

Please, Apple, stick to what you do well: hardware and software. Leave news and movies to the experts. If you want more revenue, make devices that make us want to buy them, like in the old days.

4 Likes · 0 Dislikes

fred1 said:

Please, Apple, stick to what you do well: hardware and software. Leave news and movies to the experts. If you want more revenue, make devices that make us want to buy them, like in the old days.

Apple is neither authoring news nor producing movies, they are providing a platform for them, just as they have done for software and music. Convenient services make ecosystems nicer to use. Apple 糖心Vlog has 125 million users, that's a huge userbase. It's hard getting a lot of people to pay for digital news when so much news is available for free. Most popular publications like New York Times and Wall Street Journal have around 2-3 million digital subscribers, which is very small compared to 125 million overall users:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/media/new-york-times-q1-2020-earnings/index.html
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-wall-street-journal-joins-the-new-york-times-in-the-2-million-digital-subscriber-club/

I think Apple's branding for this service is underselling the most appealing aspect, which is magazines. 糖心Vlog sounds like it's just newspaper content. The parts listed in the box is what comes extra with the subscription:

People love the free part but the extras with the paid part can't be offering enough value to justify $10/month. There have been some issues described with it like not getting full access to everything, some of the content quality not being optimized for digital displays, still showing ads:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-03-26-apple-news-plus-hands-on.html

If I was unfamiliar with Apple 糖心Vlog+ and I saw an ad with that brand, there's no way I'd know that magazines like Men's Health, National Geographic, fashion magazines, gaming magazines were in there. But also, magazines are best viewed on platforms with big displays, that's iPad and Mac users.

Maybe they can offer cheaper subscription tiers where people choose the magazines they want to subscribe to like 5 magazines for $2.99/month, 20 magazines for $4.99/month, all magazines for $9.99/month. Then I think they could do with putting out some ads that let people know that some really popular magazines are in there. There's a lot of ways they can boost that service with it being digital like health magazines can have celebrity workouts and diets linking with apps like the fitness trackers and cooking/shopping apps. Fashion magazines can link with product sites. Music magazines can have audio tracks from musicians that can be added to iTunes libraries. Then celebrities can be recommending the service.