The Good and Geeky News Channel for the Apple News on iOS 9

I’m just a little bit ahead of myself with the News

I got the confirmation email back from Apple today, to say that my application for a news channel to add to their new application for iOS News, had been accepted. I immediately went into the iCloud website and to the publisher section. I created a logo for the header and set up the RSS channels. I was getting all excited about the possibility of being able to see all of my RSS feeds in one place published for the world of Apple to view and read. Only when I clicked on the link in the email to go to the channel pages in the news aggregation did I remember that this is only going to be available when iOS 9 becomes available in the autumn. But at least I am ready!

Lots of setting up to learn

I may have to use some different HTML code within my blog posts to make sure that the posts on the news sites look as they are supposed to. I have to do some reading through the News Publishing Guide. I don’t think it is going to be too difficult to set this up.

News publisher built into iOS 9

The whole idea is that it will be to deliver a news and magazine type of format. The publisher will be out to create layouts with custom typography, rich photo galleries, videos and animations. On account of the fact that there are an awful lot of iOS devices out there, there should be a good readership for online immediate content producers like myself. We still have to wait for the Apple News Format to arrive and I’m wondering if this is going to remain a new application or will we be able to use iBooks Author or Pages to create content.

Show me the money

The monetisation is possible using iAd which is Apple’s advertising platform. The information so far is that I can sell advertising on my own behalf and earn 100% of the revenue. Isn’t that nice of them?! When Apple sells ads for me I get 70% of the revenue. It’s always good to have some other streams of income, so let’s see how this works out.

Comparisons with FlipBoard and Zite

I already have something set up with Flipboard, but I think I could do with going back into it again and double-checking on some of the settings. Just discovered that Zite has been bought out by Flipboard In many ways the new News Channels in the new app will be similar to the existing possibilities. How useful it is going to be for me as a publisher will depend upon how easy it is to send both my existing content and new content to it. If I can out the HTML codes into my own blog posts without too much hassle and without destroying what I have already then maybe it will be worth doing.