Apple’s new mobile news app will be slick, user-friendly and loaded with cool features — unless you’re an advertiser, that is.
Apple News, slated to launch next week with the iPhone’s new iOS 9 operating system, will boast brilliant graphics and quick, intuitive navigation tools. With it, users can browse articles from dozens of publications at once, with results that cater to their reading habits.
But in its zeal to create a distinctive product, Apple News is also drawing complaints from Madison Avenue about tight, unconventional restrictions on ad formats and strict approval hurdles for campaigns, industry insiders say.
“We’re like Taylor Swift,” one senior news executive told The Post, likening the situation to the blond singer’s business beef with Apple Music this summer. “[Apple News is] giving us some great ways to distribute our product, but they’re not giving us a lot of ways to monetize it.”
With tensions rising, Apple CEO Tim Cook has backed off some of the hard controls previously imposed on Apple News and its user experience. For example, Apple News recently allowed publishers to embed articles with links back to their own websites, sources said.
That’s a bid to ease worries that the Apple partnership, like Facebook’s recent “Instant Articles” initiative that hosts stories entirely on its social network, will siphon traffic away from news sites.
Apple is “clearly using this as a way to build up their own ad platform so they want to do it on their own terms,” said Edward Kim of SimpleReach, an online marketing firm.
“Apple knows that they have enough leverage given their distribution, but publishers are also rightly being careful.”
Some publishers like CNN, Time Inc. and Vox Media have thrown their weight behind Apple News, agreeing to make most of their content available on the new app in a bid to maximize readership.
But other brands — particularly those with strong paid subscription models like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp., which also publishes The Post) — are rationing stories for Apple News to only a few dozen a day or less.
Some ad execs gripe that popular tools for online ad firms, such as real-time bidding for placements, aren’t yet part of the launch. Some are also chafing at a requirement that Apple approve every campaign with 48 hours’ notice.
Under one reviled rule, pre-roll ads that precede video news segments — a fast-growing and highly profitable niche — must be vetted directly by Apple. The process, according to one exec, is “very difficult” to negotiate.
Perhaps most telling, Apple News has refused to accommodate one of the most popular tools for placing and tracking online ads — Doubleclick, the ad-serving platform owned by Google.
That, insiders say, signals a fresh front in Apple’s battle with Google, whose ads are also being targeted by a new blocking feature for Apple’s Safari Web browser.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.