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[Lex]

Yop cleverly submitted us to the new Apple News app. The app requires you to add news feeds to your phone/tablet either by "topic" or by "website".

I'm pleased to say we appear in the top 5 under the "Final Fantasy" topic (we actually appear 3 times in the top 10, which is pretty cool).

As for topics, the app seems to pull random words and phrases out of thin air (although as Yop points out, FFVII does contain "Environmental Activism") lol:

So if you've got iOS, add us by either going into the final fantasy topic or by searching for thelifestream.net (it appears as "The Lifestream" in the search, but searching for that didn't work for some bizarre reason).

 

[vaderSW1]

Holy shit! That's fucking awesome! I don't know how many folks are using this App to search for Final Fantasy but this is HUGE! This could be a nice thing to show SE as a way of proving influence as we try to get a chance to work with them.

 

[Pixel]

Is Apple News in the app store? I cant see it in there on my ipad :/

 

[Lex]

It's automatically included in iOS9, the app is just called "News".

 

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, some prerequisites: You need an iDevice running iOS 9, and it's only available in the US, UK, and Australia atm.

I also don't know how popular it'll be, or whether we'll actually get any statistics from it. If nobody will miss it, I'm tempted to pull it again if we ever have ads on the front page, it'd cost us potential income - unless apple shares in that, that is. But since we don't, and as long as everyone's okay with it, it'll provide exposure for our articles and content and shit.

 

[Flintlock]

How would it work if we had ads, would Apple take a cut of advertising revenue?

 

[Jason Tandro]

How would it work if we had ads, would Apple take a cut of advertising revenue?

My understanding is anything shared through Apple News is getting exposure on its platform, ergo, any ad revenue goes to Apple.

 

[Lex]

Ads do not show through this app at all, all of the articles are transformed to plain black on white text.

 

[Flintlock]

That's going to make our picture-rich articles (like my one yesterday) seem a bit weird.

 

[Max Caulfield]

Subscribed and kind of excited for some reason.

 

[Lex]

That's going to make our picture-rich articles (like my one yesterday) seem a bit weird.

I'll double check how they appear

 

[Lex]

Nope, images appearing fine

 

[Cthulhu]

How would it work if we had ads, would Apple take a cut of advertising revenue?

Yeah, I'd have to look up how much apple's cut is through their current mobile application advertising platform. But Google takes a cut too, so nothing new there. Although in Google's case, ads are their primary source, whereas for Apple, selling hardware is. Which makes me wonder whether Apple will ever add ads, or have some kind of revenue model for this. I think that they'll try and gather good publishers first, then add a system like their current Newsstand application, which tries to sell magazines through the apple store. They might model it after Blendle, a Dutch startup that sells articles on a per-article basis for a small fee, instead of entire magazines or monthly subscriptions. We'll have to see.

That's going to make our picture-rich articles (like my one yesterday) seem a bit weird.

Yeah, probably best to not go apeshit with formatting; stick to well-formed html and shit. But then, I'm sure the most complicated formatting we use in articles are tables.

 

[Lex]

This is how we appear:

To be frank: not ideal. We should go text/ colour only with the name (can include the typeface we currently use without the background for character) and submit a shortened version of the logo.

 

[Cthulhu]

Yes .

Any clue as to how they got their 'main' image up? I haven't seen any options for that yet.

 

[Lex]

I don't know either - you'll notice Kotaku and Game Informer are also missing theirs, so I have to assume there's no easy way to do it or perhaps they have strict logo guidelines?