The Real Importance of Apple’s Acquisition of Texture

In late February, I started writing a piece entitled “Why Apple should buy Texture.” For months I had been studying Apple’s need to acquire more content and original programming. In my main Techpinions column on Monday, I laid out the challenge they have in this area given the strong investments competitors like Netflix and Amazon are making, especially in video content.

I did not add Texture to Monday’s column as I was mainly focusing on video, but last month, when I was researching this topic, I concluded that Apple needed to be more aggressive with their books and magazine services as they had been languishing way behind Amazon and Texture.

So I was not surprised when Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, Eddie Cue, during a session at SXSW on Monday, stated that Apple had bought Texture. In the column I was writing about this back in February, I reasoned that “Texture already had done the kind of legwork that would give Apple an edge in the publishing business and that this service would make them more competitive in the world of magazine publishing. It would also give them more content to add to their overall services offerings.” BTW, the reason I did not finish the article at that time was that so many other major tech news and issues came up that took precedence over this article and I held it with the goal of publishing it later this month.

I am a big fan of Texture and have used it since it first came to market. It has close to 200 magazines that I can read for a price of $9.99 a month. While I subscribe to only 20% of what is available, the magazines I do get are of real interest to me. As a self-described foodie, I subscribe to all food magazines and read all of them each month. It has two specialty mags on Diabetes that I also read religiously. I subscribe to a couple of car magazines to keep up with another area of interest and download each month or week most tech and business pubs such as PC Mag, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, MacWorld, Wired, Fortune. I also subscribe to news and commentary magazines like Time, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, as well as a few sports mags such as ESPN and Golf Magazine.

What is unique in almost all of these magazines is that they subscribe to high levels of journalism and I have much more trust in what I read in them than I do from items being posted on Facebook and Twitter, in which so much of it is “fake news.”

From my experience, when I am in Texture I feel like I am in a “safe zone” and while some of the more opinionated magazines could have some fake news in their commentary, for the most part, I find the articles are written to be well researched and representative of the old school journalism that I have grown up with and admired for decades.

Apple may not understand this “safe zone’ concept that Texture provides and most likely purchased Texture to bolster their desire to be a bigger player in the publishing business. But for many Texture fanatics like myself, this is one of the real reasons I go to the mags in Texture on a daily basis, besides the fact that it has publications of real interest to me.

Fake news on social media sites is not going away-ever. These sites are now abused in ways nobody imagined until recently. At the same time, people do want to read well written and researched content that they can trust, and the magazines in Texture, for the most part, delivers on that promise. While the strategic goal for Apple will be to bulk up their publishing business and add more content for customers to broaden their ecosystem, I believe for millions of people, Texture delivers one of the best “safe haven’s” for quality journalism. And if Apple can control the quality of their magazine offerings, it will have another hit on its hands.