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Murdoch's Big Bet Gone Bad: iPad Only Publication Not Engaging Readers Much

from the that-was-tough dept

Thu, Apr 7th 2011 3:51pm — Mike Masnick

You know, it really wasn't that hard to predict that the brainchild of Rupert and James Murdoch -- an iPad-only news publication, called The Daily, that people would pay for -- would flop. The Murdochs (father and son) don't have a particularly good history of succeeding on the internet. In fact, they have a history that is mostly littered with failure when it comes to internet ventures. But, in an age when ubiquity, availability, access and sharing are what consumers want, coming up with a publication that was locked down, specific to a single platform, and quite limited, just seemed like a bad recipe from the start. We'd already noted that a bunch of the "big name" journalists and staffers that had been brought on to The Daily had been leaving just weeks after the publication launched.

But what about readers? While the Murdochs have been quiet, the folks over at Nieman Lab put together a nice proxy, in looking at how many people were Tweeting stories from The Daily's iPad app. I'm sure it's not a perfect correlation, but if people were really engaged with the news from The Daily -- which, increasingly, is an important aspect of news communities, you would expected to see this number continue to go up. Instead, as Joshua Benton describes, it's "decline, plateau, decline." Here's the graphical representation:

Again, this almost certainly does not represent a direct correlation to readership. We see stories that gets lots of traffic get very few tweets or comments, and stories with relatively little traffic get a ton of comments. But, on the whole, as an overall proxy, it at least suggests something not good is going on at The Daily in terms of actually getting readers engaged.

And, I think, that's the obvious problem the Murdochs always run into with their online efforts. They're good at producing content. They're dreadful at actually engaging with a community. They bought MySpace, but their failure to understand what people there wanted resulted in its rather massive decline. It seems clear, with the Daily, that engagement and interacting were an afterthought. At best, it was a "let them tweet!" sort of discussion, rather than a look at how to actually engage the community in any meaningful way.

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Filed Under: engagement, subscriptions, the daily
Companies: news corp.

13 Comments

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Richard (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 4:07pm

And, I think, that's the obvious problem the Murdochs always run into with their online efforts. They're good at producing content.
They aren't good at producing content. What they are good at is using their financial muscle to buy up rights to content that has a ready made audience!
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Ken (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 6:58pm

I used to have a lot of respect for Rupert Murdock but not any more. He is an IP Maximilist that tried to force the IPM agenda through his publications. It did not work and now the Times of London has lost almost all its readers, influence, and relevance. Even the dead tree addition has suffered. Murdock does not do well with the Internet because he hates the very idea of it.
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fogbugzd (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 7:56pm

I doubt the discussion focused on whether to "let them tweet." I would guess that at least part of the discussion was whether they could charge extra to tweet. After all, when someone tweets about an article in The Daily they are stealing content from the publication. Not to mention that Twitter is making money from the tweet and should share its revenue with the publishers.
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- DearMrMiller (profile), 8 Apr 2011 @ 4:09am
  
  Re:
  Hahahahahahahhaha.. oh... holds belly... hahahaha.. oh the spasms just won't stop. Phew. Oh boy. I think I actually snorted a bit while I was laughing there. Thank god I wasn't eating something otherwise my screen would be covered in food.
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Jan, 7 Apr 2011 @ 8:29pm

That's interesting considering Apple just launched their beta testing program at www.applebeta-testing.com
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PW (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 9:16pm

SkyGrid
It would be interesting to do a comparison between the Daily's metrics/stats and those of SkyGrid which is a news aggregator that tracks memes as well as news on any topic. Their apps are on the key mobile platforms, iPad, iPhone and Android.
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- Bob Hahn, 9 Apr 2011 @ 1:40pm
  
  Re: SkyGrid
  I have both. When The Daily first came out, I went through it every day, mostly because of the novelty factor. These days I still go through SkyGrid every day, but some days I just don't "get around to" The Daily.
  
  Basically they are both news aggregators; it's just that The Daily has a human staff that decides what material will go into it, whereas SkyGrid appears to use an algorithm and will use sources you give it. After a month or so of use, my sense is that The Daily spends more time than I want to spend on Celebrity Gossip type stuff, and not enough on things I can cause SkyGrid to tell me.
  
  This still leaves the long-run problem that Murdoch is trying to address, which is "where are the aggregators going to get material if all the original-journalism efforts go bankrupt because no one will pay for them?"
  
  I applaud Murdoch for trying an experiment, but it looks like I'm not the only one who is gradually losing interest in The Daily.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2011 @ 10:43pm

Meanwhile, your Flattr count sits at a cool ZERO.

/fail
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- Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2011 @ 11:51pm
  
  Re:
  Meanwhile, the tweet count for this single article is about the same as the count for the daily average for The Daily.
  
  /your comparison is terrible, as usual.
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- The eejit (profile), 8 Apr 2011 @ 4:12am
  
  Re:
  If that's your measure of success, no wonder your other ventures failed.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2011 @ 10:45pm

Maybe everyone got Real Serious about not infringing the Daily's copyright by using that pirate tool.

/massivesarcasm
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The Devil's Coachman (profile), 8 Apr 2011 @ 5:33am

The Daily was a dung heap of drivel
I downloaded the trial version of this POS. Used it once. Deleted it. Too bad I will never get back those minutes of wasted time. And they want people to pay for this? Crap! Utter crap! Written by and for morons.
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Gene Cavanaugh, 8 Apr 2011 @ 6:03pm

The Murdochs
Great article, but I take exception with the "good at producing content" remark. The Murdochs are, and have always been, in what was formerly called "yellow journalism", that is, biased reporting.
They happened to be big in that when the world-wide tastes went from considered journalism to biased journalism, and so satisfied the current tastes in "news".
It does go along with what Techdirt keeps pointing out; when the public tastes turned to the more trivial, the older, more conventional businesses failed to adapt, and the Murdochs took the market away from them.
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