Originally published: June 18, 2015 · Updated: June 17, 2026
The June 2015 post called Apple's News app launch with iOS 9 as a quiet but significant move into news aggregation. The piece read it correctly at the time: Apple was offering publishers a more convenient distribution surface in exchange for routing their content through Apple's product. Eleven years on, the structural pattern Apple deployed in 2015 became the operating template for the entire 2024–2026 AI licensing wave. The piece is one of the cleanest early signals on this site of what AI Communications would later formalize.
What 2015 called
Three observations that aged well.
The "convenient alternative they can't delete" mechanic. The 2015 piece named the pre-installation play. Apple News shipped with iOS 9 as a non-removable app. Users did not have to use it, but they could not get rid of it. The mechanic worked. By 2023, Apple News was reaching over 125 million monthly active users in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia. The default-distribution play converted into durable distribution.
The publisher-as-supplier structural shift. The 2015 piece named the underlying dynamic. Apple was positioning publishers as content suppliers to an Apple-owned distribution layer. The publishers gave up some control over presentation, monetization, and customer relationship in exchange for reach. Some accepted enthusiastically. Some resisted. By 2024, every major publisher had executed some version of the same deal multiple times — with Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, Apple News, Apple News+, and eventually with OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The Newsstand parallel. The 2015 piece noted that Apple News was technically a successor to the failed Newsstand app, and that success was not guaranteed. Apple News outperformed Newsstand — but the broader point held. Apple deployed multiple platform-distribution products and iterated against each one until the model worked. The same iterative pattern characterized Apple's later moves into Apple Music, Apple TV+, and most recently Apple Intelligence.
What 2026 adds — the AI licensing wave
The 2015 piece predicted the structural shape of every major content-distribution deal that followed. The 2024–2026 AI licensing wave is the most consequential version yet.
OpenAI signed Associated Press, News Corp, Axel Springer, Reuters, Condé Nast, Vox Media, The Atlantic, Time, Vox, the Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith, and dozens of smaller publishers between 2023 and 2025. Anthropic followed with its own wave. Perplexity built a publisher revenue-share program. Google adapted AI Overviews to surface attributable sources from licensed partners. Microsoft integrated News Corp coverage into Bing's chat surfaces. Every deal runs on the same structural mechanic Apple News deployed in 2015 — convenient distribution at a controlled layer in exchange for publisher content.
The difference in 2026 is the substrate. The 2015 Apple deal routed publisher content through an iPhone app. The 2024–2026 deals route publisher content through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The buyer is no longer scrolling a news feed. The buyer is asking a question and receiving an answer. The publisher's content either appears inside that answer or does not.
What the 2015 piece did not see
One thing.
The biggest beneficiaries of the next decade of platform-distribution deals would not be the platforms or the publishers. They would be the AI engines that arrived later and consolidated retrieval at a layer above both. By 2026, the publisher who signed Apple News in 2015 and an OpenAI licensing deal in 2024 is operating under platform terms set by entities they do not control, at substrates they did not anticipate. The publishers that built independent, retrievable, named-entity corpus on properties they own have material structural advantages over the publishers that relied on platform distribution. Everything-PR, Olam, and the ronntorossian.com archive are explicitly built on the independent model — owned properties, named operators, indexed corpus, no platform dependency.
Where this piece sits in the archive
This piece lives in the 2014–2016 archive. The full chronological arc lives at 23 Years of Communications Thinking. Industry analysis on the consolidated archive: Everything-PR. EPR's ongoing coverage of the AI licensing wave runs in the Technology vertical.
AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The 2015 Apple News play encoded the structural template every later platform-distribution deal would follow — and the structural risk that the publishers who relied on those deals would eventually face.
Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications