• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 8, 2016

While big tech platforms like Facebook and Snapchat have been reducing the amount of real estate they make available to publishers, there is a spot of good news. Some publishers are seeing growing audiences with Apple News, according to Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, citing several prominent cases in a new report.

While the data is mostly anecdotal, these examples hold out hope that smaller publishers may also benefit from the platform’s scale, as well as several new publishing features introduced by Apple in recent months

The Nieman report points to the success of several prominent publishers, including CNN, which saw its total Apple News audience soar from 5 million unique users in August to 36.5 million in September. Over the same period, its total page views jumped from 43 million to 274 million.

Although part of this increase may be due to the presidential election, CNN chief product officer Alex Wellen also credited new functionality introduced by Apple for the service, including breaking news notifications.

Over several weeks in October, CNN’s notifications to viewers jumped from 188,000 recipients per day to 3.7 million.

Bloomberg has also enjoyed major audience growth, thanks in part to the breaking news notifications feature, according Nieman. The total number of unique visitors to Bloomberg content on Apple News rose 500% in October, due to notifications, as well as high-profile placements in the Apple News “Top Stories.”

Apple News has introduced some other new features that ought to benefit publishers as well, like paid subscriptions. Technical improvements that should eventually aid monetization include a new analytics dashboard and a bigger selection of ad formats.

As noted, publishers have endured some setbacks on other big tech platforms in recent months.

In October,Snapchat reshuffled the order in which it shows users content from their network to give greater priority to Stories from their friends, at the expense of publisher content. And in June, Facebook announced it was reducing the amount of publisher content users see in their news feeds, with a new system prioritizing personal content over news and information.

Nor have all the changes from Apple itself been positive.

In September, Apple began redirecting traffic from the popular news section of its “Spotlight” search screen to content hosted natively within the Apple News app, rather than on the publishers’ own sites, leaving fewer visitors for publishers to monetize directly.