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The Daily Struggles to Find an Audience
After months of free downloads and plenty of hoopla, the first iPad-only newspaper started charging this month and its future is far from assured.
According to Forbes.com’s Jeff Bercovici, the paper so far is nothing more than a blip on a radar screen:
How many subscriptions to The Daily, News Corp.’s iPad-only multimedia newspaper, have been sold since the expiration of the free trial period last week? I have no idea.
But I do know a little something about how The Daily fared with consumers during the trial. I’m told the app was downloaded 500,000 times. (Publisher Greg Clayman has said publicly that it had amassed “hundreds of thousands” of downloads.) Since Apple has sold around 20 million iPads so far — 14.8 million last year and an estimated 5 million to 8.8 million so far in 2011 — that would mean something like 2.5 percent of iPad users have at least tried out The Daily.
Bercovici also reported that he has been told that The Daily has 75,000 regular users who are willing to keep reading the paper during the free-trial period.
How many of those “regular” readers will stick around now that the paper is charging 99 cents per week or $39.99 per year is the big question.
As with almost any free app, downloads tend to be relatively heavy once users become aware that it is available, and even though the total number represents a fraction of iPads sold to date it isn’t a number to be scoffed at, especially with newspapers struggling to find readers of any stripe.
But has Rupert Murdoch bet too much on The Daily?
Bercovici says that Jeff Jarvis did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured that The Daily would need 750,000 paying subscribers, or ten times the estimated number of regular users to break even. That would put it in the same neighborhood as The New York Times’ daily print circulation, which underscores the challenge Murdoch faces.
As with any start-up operation, it can take years before it generates enough revenue to break even and Murdoch has shown a great deal of patience with his other ventures so that he is likely to wait and see if The Daily takes off.
But unlike other newspapers whose content is also available on the iPad, The Daily is a static newspaper that will only be updated once a day instead of throughout the day as news breaks. This will leave readers a step behind, which is surprising coming from a veteran newspaper publisher and cable news magnate.
Media research from knowDigital just released a study on the obstacles The Daily faces.
The Daily is like a shiny new toy. But now that they are charging for it, the luster is likely to quickly wear off and it will return to the users’ virtual toy boxes where it will be forgotten and ignored.
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About the author
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.
Look out liberal green hogs the ANGRY BIRDS are comming to getcha