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Newspaper industry

The Daily struggles to gain subscribers

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Bloomberg is reporting that Ruport Murdock’s much heralded The Daily is struggling to get enough subscribers to break even. The Daily’s daily usage is about 120,000 – much less than the 500,000 it needs to break even.

News Corp.’s digital publication isn’t compelling enough to change people’s reading habits and its marketing push, including an ad spot in Super Bowl XLV, hasn’t created wide recognition, said Ken Doctor, author of the Newsonomics blog, which tracks technology and news.
“The Daily’s proving to be a great R&D experiment but probably not a viable business,” Doctor said in an interview. “It’s not breaking through the national noise.”

I tried the app when it first came out, but found it buggy and slow. There have been many updates to the app since, which I presume fixed the technical side of the issue, but the content was always limited. After the free trial, I opted not to subscribe.

The Bloomberg article mentions that to gain more readers, The Daily also has a Facebook app. Murdock’s plan was to keep it all on the iPad. At this point, I think they should also consider supporting other tablets.

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Comments 5

  1. I understand Murdoch still has someone print out his email for him and does not have a computer on his desk. But couldn’t someone from this century have told him that you can’t limit yourself to a single platform and expect mass-media results?

    Next up: An Amish developer finds that his line of automobiles, which run on kerosene, have not taken over the market.

    1. Link is fixed. Thanks for letting me know, Mike.

  2. Hey Alan, the text link in the first paragraph above goes to the Kindle story. Can you fix it?

  3. Great. The link is fixed, but now you’re contributor recognition system is down.

  4. As is my copy-editing robotron.

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