What you need to know
- NBCUniversal has signed a new multi-year deal with Apple.
- The deal continues NBCUniversal's partnership as the exclusive seller of ads for Apple News and Stocks.
- NBCUniversal took on the partnership after Apple had sunsetted its iAds program years ago.
NBCUniversal has extended its partnership with Apple to be the exclusive seller of ads for the company's Apple News app and now, the Apple Stocks app as well. Reported by Axios, the partnership began in 2017 and has now been extended to another multi-year deal. The new contact not only gives NBCUniversal exclusive rights to selling ads for the main feed of Apple's News app but now for its Stocks app as well.
Krishan Bhatia, NBCU's EVP of Business Operations & Strategy says that the partnership has become significant for NBCUniversal:
"It's a very meaningfully-sized business compared to what we do on Youtube, Twitter or Snapchat...it's a highly-scaled audience with high engagement in a premium content environment. The average user spends over an hour per month on it."
Bhatia goes on to say that the number of advertisers on the platform, which had reached around 100 last year, has now doubled to "multiple hundreds". NBCUniversal also states that its editorial content has reached over 42 million hours of engagement since January 2018.
NBCUniversal is not the only way to sell ads on Apple News or Apple Stocks. Publishers are allowed to sell ads for their own content and keep 100% of revenues from those ads, but ad performance from many independent publishers has been reported as lacking.
Apple had shut down its iAds business years ago and tapped NBCUniversal to carry that business forward in its Apple News app and, with this newly announced deal, the Stocks app as well. Apple also offers its Apple News+ service to customers for $9.99 a month, but the reaction from consumers and publishers so far has been underwhelming. Apple has committed to improving the service, but those potential changes have not taken effect yet.
