According to local reports, Apple News has turned out to be the most popular news app in the United Kingdom as maintained by official data. It has around 13.2 Million users, with BBC News coming in second place with around 12.5 Million users. But as it goes with most things Apple, there is quite a major asterisk along with this information. Press-Gazette has mentioned that while the news app from Apple was used by the highest number of users, BBC news did lead the way when it came to total time which was spent on the app.
Apple News Gains Massive Following In The United Kingdom
In the last month of 2021, users went ahead and spent around 2.2 billion minutes in the official BBC app- which was around a billion more minutes than Apple News. This does work out to an average of 172 minutes per person for BBC News, and 93 minutes for Apple’s app. Interestingly, user engagement was dominated by another media company- Mail- a tabloid that has since now gained a reputation for putting through provocative and misleading stories. Due to the inflammatory nature of the news, there is usually a heated debate in the comments section of the app.
The report also puts through an interesting difference between the markets in the US and the UK when it comes to news sources like the Apple News app. In the United States, news aggregators are usually more popular than most of the individual publications, while the United Kingdom usually sees more people choosing to get their news from individual publications- with legacy newspapers being more popular.
With Apple News being free in the United Kingdom- along with the majority of the news apps in the country, the survey didn’t provide any insight into paid news access- which in turn led to no information on how many Brits had subscribed to Apple News+.