Google News doesn't show ads.
Yes and they are still burning money into it. Apple Music, nearly 5 years after its launch and despite its home advantage is still lacking behind Spotify. Thinking of the same to Apple TV+. And likely the same to Apple Arcade.
Apple Music has been making some inroads after Iovine is out. But Streaming business wasn't ever going to make much money anyway.
Oh and I forgot, Apple Cash, Apple Wallet... and lots of other things Apple seemingly has forgotten about.
The numbers are what counts, not what you’re ‘thinking’ is ‘likely’.
And to be clear, I’m just talking about free news content, no subscriptions, nothing you couldn’t get easily by going to the actual website, so any paid licensing geo restrictions shouldn’t really be relevant.
What’s even worse is that the Apple News app could allow adding RSS feeds from sites, but it doesn’t recognize RSS officially but will use it internally for sites in Apple’s whitelist. If it allowed adding any random feed, it could potentially be my go to app for news.
Contrast that to Google News — which is predicated on collecting information and showing ads (edit: Google News doesn’t insert ads into news sources, as pointed by gundmc in a reply) — that’s widely available. In Google News, you can get a link of the original article to share with others (and with perhaps an additional step in some cases, avoid tracking of where from and how the link came). In Apple News, sharing a link gives you a cryptic Apple News domain link, which tracks all clicks. I trust Apple more on privacy than I trust Google, but this is one of those annoying things.
I’m sure Apple isn’t trying to beat Google on this front. Apple is just hoping to get paying subscribers while retaining a huge cut of the revenues.