How Apple March 25 Announcement Looks a Lot Like ‘The Game of Thrones’

The battle among the titans of tech for the ‘digital’ throne is just like the battle for the ‘iron’ one.

On March 25 Apple announced an upcoming slew of new subscription services it’s launching through Apple News +, Apple Card, Apple Arcade and Apple TV +. But the company’s new, deeper dive into news, television and video games — formerly the purview of other companies — doesn’t mean it’s now competing for subscribers against the likes of Netflix, Disney or the New York Times.

That’s because when you compare subscriber totals, the company that Steve Jobs built has already won that battle.Apple Announcement Looks Like The Game of Thrones

Instead, Apple is going head-to-head with Google, Amazon and Facebook, battling it out for ownership of customers and their attention spans, plus the accompanying data that comes along with that. So, the question is, what should we think about Apple’s decision to insert itself into the cultural zeitgeist, setting off a kind of battle of the digital titans?

Personally, I’ve chosen to see this as “the battle for the “digital iron throne,” an obvious reference to the upcoming, April 14, final season opener of the monstrously popular (assuming you like dragons) Game of Thrones and the “iron throne” that all GoT parties are vying for (with a side of White Walkers thrown in).

Here’s how I’ve calculated who will win that war (the one with Apple and Google, not with Khaleesi and Cersei.)

Why scale matters

When it comes to audiences and data, scale matters more than anything. In this sense, Apple, Google and Facebook are in a league by themselves. There are 700 million iPhone users worldwide and 1.3 billion Apple device users, total. Google has 1.4 billion Android users and 1.8 billion monthly YouTube users. And the biggest of the bunch, Facebook, has 2.3 billion monthly active users (MAUs).

By comparison, Netflix has only 148 million subscribers. Spotify has 191 million active users globally, less than half of whom are premium subscribers. And the New York Times website gets 282.2 million visitors per month, though only 4 million are paid subscribers. Most of the companies competing for a share of our attention and data, then, have an audience that’s a mere 10 percent (or less) of the size of Apple’s, Google’s or Facebook’s.

Read more: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/331641