News Corp. Finally Realizes Locked Up, iPad-Only News Publication Was A Dud, Shuts It Down

from the about-time dept

Back in 2010 there was all sorts of buzz around News Corp. investing a ton of money into a "secret" project to launch an iPad-only paywalled publication called "the Daily." Before it even launched, we explained why this was a bad idea that missed the point. We also highlighted Rupert Murdoch/News Corps' long list of failed internet projects -- with the large majority of them flopping because they were about trying to create "broadcast" style properties online, without recognizing that the internet is more of a communications (many-to-many) medium than a broadcast (one-to-many) medium. And, of course, soon after The Daily launched there was evidence that very few people cared.

To be honest, given all the bad press about how few people were reading it, combined with stories of staffers jumping ship soon after it was launched, I had kind of figured that The Daily had already been shut down. However, the latest news is that News Corp. is finally putting it out of its misery and shutting it down, giving most staffers 3 months severance. A few staffers are being folded into the NY Post:

News Corporation also announced that effective immediately, Jesse Angelo, the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Daily and long-time Executive Editor of The New York Post, will assume the role of Publisher of The New York Post. As part of a digital restructuring initiative, the company will cease standalone publication of The Daily iPad app on December 15, 2012, though the brand will live on in other channels. Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.

Mr. Murdoch said: “From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term..."

Apparently the site was losing $30 million a year.

Perhaps this should stand as a response to the people who insist that giving away newspaper content free online was "the original sin" of the industry and they should have focused on paywalls. Paywalls don't help you build up "a large enough audience." The link above quotes a reporter there saying: "It was a really cool, hip product. I think this is nothing more than bad timing." I'd say it was much more of a bad model -- both business model and delivery model -- than "bad timing."

Filed Under: broadcast, communication, failure, paywall, rupert murdoch, shut down, the daily

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

from the that-was-tough dept

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.

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

That Was Fast: News Corp's Just Launched iPad-Only Publication Losing Journalists

from the into-the-lifeboats dept

We had warned from early on that News Corp's "iPad-only" fee-based publication, The Daily, was a disaster in the making. After a ton of hype, and launching a few weeks ago to a ton of overwrought praise, all we've been hearing is that people aren't buying. A bunch of folks checked it out early, and then it more or less disappeared off the map. And now, it appears that staffers are bailing at a rapid rate. Of course, in the run up to launch, there was all this talk about how Murdoch was hiring a ton of big name journalists and staffers away from other publications. To see a bunch of them rushing out the door, barely weeks after the launch, suggests this may be a failure of epic proportions.

Filed Under: ipad, paywalls, platforms, the daily
Companies: news corp.