Hello and happy Friday!

Apologies for my absence these last couple of weeks, and thanks to Dom for filling in two weeks ago - last Friday was an Easter bank holiday in the UK and the Friday before that I was busy writing up an interview with a crystal meth dealer (not for publication in Press Gazette, I’m afraid).

Todays’s edition of the newsletter is led by two big pieces of tech giant news.

First up: app developers and publishers alike have long griped about Apple’s practice of charging 30% on all transactions within its App Store, which until last year was the only place iPhone users could get their apps in the first place. That happened because the EU used its new Digital Markets Act to force Apple to make the change.

This week the European Commission has ruled, again based on the Digital Markets Act, that Apple must cease levying its “excessive” one-third cut on all sales within the App Store, which includes any publisher subscriptions sold through an iPhone app.

You may ask why publishers haven’t simply redirected would-be customers to their own platforms for cheaper subscriptions: the answer is they can’t (explicitly at least) because that redirection is also against Apple’s rules. This, too, is set to change with the Commission’s ruling.

And in an explicitly global move, Google has gone beyond its previous position that it would no longer deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, saying it now won’t even give users a standalone prompt asking if they want to opt-out from the tracking tech. Publishers might well want to keep progressing with their strategies to secure their audiences’ first-party data, but this stay of execution for cookies seems set to take the pressure off significantly.

Also this week I spoke with Politico’s Kate Day, who has helped shape the European side of the increasingly transatlantic business since a little after it launched a decade ago. Day and I spoke about the resilience of the Politico business model in spite of the $8m of contracts cancelled earlier this year in a DOGE-related blow-up and what she thinks of former close colleague Jack Blanchard’s young stewardship of the DC Playbook newsletter. (You can also listen to the interview as a podcast here.)

And following on from the expansion of its Mail+ premium subscription to the US, Daily Mail publisher DMG Media has launched its first podcast subscription offer, focused exclusively on true crime. It follows on from the success of the company’s “The Trial” series bringing daily court reporting into the podcast format, and DMG’s head of audio told me that in soft launch the service already has “thousands” of paying listeners.

Have a great weekend,

Bron

EU’s €500m fine of Apple and enforcement action is good news for publishers

“Publishers can now offer their subscribers promotions and deals in their own apps enabling them to build better customer relationships with their subscribers,” said the executive director of the European Publishers Council.

Read more

Google scraps plans for alternative Sandbox ad-targeting technology

Some publishers, such as Dotdash Meredith, have already moved away from cookie-based targeting in favour of other solutions.

Read more

Politico Europe reports ‘significant growth’ as its team reaches 350 people

Despite broader fears of an advertising slowdown as businesses fret about a possible recession, Day said Politico’s ad sale numbers “are looking pretty healthy for this year”.

Read more

How Mail has gained thousands of subscribers for crime podcasts

“Over the next two weeks we’ve got one [The Trial series] in New York, we’ve got one live in Melbourne and we’ve got one live in London as well.”

Read more

Also on Press Gazette:

• Ziff Davis sues OpenAI while Washington Post signs deal

• Facebook increasing as part of social traffic mix after algorithm change, data shows

• 2025 journalism job cuts tracked: Houston Landing closes, Quartz sale results in newsroom layoffs

• Global ad spend against news down by a third since pre-Covid

• G/O Media CEO says future for Quartz ‘extremely bright’ despite newsroom being laid off

• Publishers delete and amend stories based on dubious experts

• Dotdash Meredith makes major investment in ‘Tiktok-like’ People app

• AI scraper violations and what we can do about them: New research reveals scale of problem

And elsewhere…