Why 'The Daily' Failed
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
I can add very little to Shirky's critique, so I will just recommend that people go and read his pieces and compare their predictions to what actually happened to The Daily.
Is he pretending not to understand, or he really doesn't know? Publishing on the web doesn't limit users, since web is an open and accessible platform (given that you have any decent browser). Publishing "to iPad" is artificially limiting your audience, because publishers weren't smart enough to use cross platform publishing technologies (PDF anyone?).
So no - one platform publishing is plain stupid in this day and age. And no - the Web is not called one platform publishing either.
No Postscript, no PDF.
You can see this for yourself if you let Charles or any kind of wire sniffer observe the network traffic while The Daily loads a new issue.
iOS is also a very different environment with regards to payment:
- On iOS the process of purchasing paid and free apps is the same: you type in your password.
- On the web the process of purchasing paid applications has built-in friction: 'free' is the default, and payment requires the user to trust the store, input card information etc.
There are more people on the web, but web users are less willing to pay for things.
I don't deny that a larger audience is better, but it adds overhead to support more platforms, so focusing on one can be an advantage. Marco, the creator of The Magazine (http://the-magazine.org), mentioned that he hasn't ruled out other platforms, but with limited resources it's easier to focus on iOS for now (he's the sole developer). Apparently after four issues he already has enough income to pay market rates per-word to writers and hire an editor.
And comparison with regional physical newspaper distribution is not valid, since physical media is limited with physical space. Digital media is not - it can easily be distributed anywhere the network can reach, as far as publisher put just minimal effort to publish it in accessible form. So there is for sure nothing smart in limiting the distribution media to one isolated platform.
Publishers should however consider approaching their readers with respect. Limiting access to content with platform is not pleasant for those who don't use that platform. In case of physical books / magazines there is no such limitation. So spending some more resources to avoid offending potential readers is a worthy goal. Plus as I said that overhead doesn't sound to be that dramatic - what's so difficult in providing a link to a PDF?
So in that context, his response makes sense.
if they couldn't make a 100,000 iPad publication work for this kind of budget, they're bloated & should go out of business.
The failure of The Daily is not a statement on Apple's 30 % cut, iPad vs web publishing. It's a damning commentary on yesteryear's Journalism still not getting it.
Looks like the model can make sense. You have to be smart about the audience and focus on quality, value-add content.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/27/chartier
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/12/drones-rejection
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/08/kontra-design
I do have to admit that he does take an unholy delight in mocking pundits, stock analysts, or those who play them on TV, who make stupid Apple predictions which prove to be stupid.
Somebody ought to. Tech pundits are no better than those idiot psychics that make a set of predictions every December for the coming year: Which celebrities will die, which will divorce, and so on. They're nearly always wrong, but when they catch a break and get something right, they boast about it for years.
Tech punditry is a noxious racket. I don't think we need fewer Grubers, or that Gruber should branch out and start serving claim chowder to the people who bash Microsoft, I think we need more Grubers calling these people out across the entire industry.
So the first person that should be called out by these "new Grubers", could be Gruber himself.
TL;DR Quote; This is what galls some: Apple is doing this because they can, and no other company is in a position to do it. This is not a fear that in-app subscriptions will fail because Apple’s 30 percent slice is too high, but rather that in-app subscriptions will succeed despite Apple’s (in their minds) egregious profiteering. I.e. that charging what the market will bear is somehow unscrupulous. To the charge that Apple Inc. is a for-profit corporation run by staunch capitalists, I say, “Duh”.
If it was Google or Microsoft which did the exact same thing, Gruber would've raked them over the coals for blatant profiteering and restricting developer freedom.
Not to mention snark against Google, Android, Motorola, Nokia, Amazon etc. like calling the pink Lumia lipstick on a turd. Only increasing his readership and RSS ad costs though.
Because the population of people buying a yearly subscription to a newspaper is quite special to begin with - if you are counting on the increased publicity by being in the app store to sell subscriptions, I think you are doing something wrong.
Of course The Daily probably made mistakes as well. But I'm very sure that the succesful models of the future will neither be Ipad only nor giving up 30% to Apple without adding much value to the customer in doing so...
The best thing I can say in The Daily's favor is that the app took advantage of the native frameworks for kerning and text layout, even if the hyphenation was screwed up.
For an app like The Daily to take better advantage of being a native app, there'd have be better tools available to content creators so that they can actually use those features. Camera input. Keyframe animations. Multitrack audio. Even, dare I say it, 3D content.
I know I only tried out the Magazine because it was so simple to subscribe - and just as importantly, I knew how easy it would be to cancel if I didn't like it.
I never read the Daily, but apart from the Magazine, all the Newsstand apps I've tried have been utter crap.
Of course that demographic is going to disappear and all huge newspapers have financial problems at the moment. But for example the NewYork Times web subscription has >500.000 paying subscribers... I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.
From a purely economical perspective, this is a very good point....
> An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news. He drew his data from a Canadian organization—the Inventor’s Assistance Program—which collects a small fee to provide inventors with an objective assessment of the commercial prospects of their idea. The evaluations rely on careful ratings of each invention on 37 criteria, including need for the product, cost of production, and estimated trend of demand. The analysts summarize their ratings by a letter grade, where D and E predict failure—a prediction made for over 70% of the inventions they review. The forecasts of failure are remarkably accurate: only 5 of 411 projects that were given the lowest grade reached commercialization, and none was successful.
- Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow
The full data table is available here: http://www.fptt-pftt.gc.ca/pdf/Astebro_Gerchak.pdf (page 36)
iPad only?
http://learn.thedaily.com/android/
"he publisher of News Corp.’s The Daily said earlier this year that the iPad-only publication might need a few more years to be profitable. Today the company announced it won’t get that chance."
- iPhone + Android phone sub
- iPad AND iPhone + Android phone sub
Android phone is equivalent to Kindle Fire. I have no idea why the Kindle was promoted over the Android phone, but it wasn't originally conceived as an exclusive.
Even to this day, I have no idea how the Android tablet subscriptions were handled. It was a Verizon exclusive, it was preloaded for exactly one tablet and it couldn't be uninstalled. I don't even know how many tablets were sold like this, but I don't believe it was many.
The Daily for Android tablet did an impressive job of replicating some parts of UIKit for Android. Shame nobody saw it.
They should take note that game apps haven't been sustainable on anything near that bloated an operation either.
If they were trying to run it on a much more modest staff, say 20, they would be profitable.
If you went no farther than The Economist's software, with $1mm/yr of writing focusing (as Gruber suggests) on opinion, news, and analysis, I'd be willing to pay $20-30/yr.
I would prefer something like Foreign Affairs, although slightly more timely (weekly or biweekly, vs bimonthly).
Personally I don't see the Daily as a failure. Of all the newspapers I see online in the UK, the only ones making money from it are the Times (with it's paywall) and so on. The Daily was a good experiment but ultimately would've suffered more from limited market sizes (why not web? why not android? why not every platform and a html5 backend?), but fundamentally I suspect what killed the daily off (at least for the UK) was the Times iPad edition. With it, Murdoch has a dead tree and online version and is making money from both. Thus, the need for the Daily (still running at a loss) to exist is gone, but you can bet that the Times iPad was definitely influenced by the Daily.
[1] - http://www.kernelmag.com/yiannopoulos/3703/thank-god-for-mur...
Reporters from traditional magazines talk to interesting people, write articles and newspapers print them (of course I simplified things a bit).
But today I can directly connect to Elon Musk and Bill Gates twitter feed. I don't need any middleman to read blogs written by experts. How reporters can add value, do we really need them?
Yesterday I've got email from Vint Cerf about free and open web. The question is why this action isn't initiated by journalists?
That kind of reporting is expensive, both directly and indirectly (in terms of goodwill and access to politicians). Newspapers are burning too much money now that they no longer have a monopoly on news (and, more importantly, ads) so they have to cut costs -- and the easiest thing to cut is the kind of expensive reporting that we really need them for.
I am almost always downvoted when I say so, but the NYT is not a good paper anymore, it has become a rag -- it may still only print what is fit to print, but it has long ago stopped printing exactly the kind of news they should be printing -- and which I would have been willing to pay for.
Augmenting a story with accountability and completeness is arguably the primarily responsibility of newspapers and journalists, especially in the Internet era.
Good on him for trying something new and failing. He is trying to sell his product and it failed.
And not only did it fail but he was straight enough to give us an idea of the costs and pitfalls involved in trying to run something like this. I wish others were as straight up with outlining their failures so we can all learn from them.
Oh, you've read the Denver Post. http://www.denverpost.com/
"A Media News Group web site." http://www.medianewsgroup.com/Pages/default.aspx
Considering that no one presented statistical evidence of any form, I don't know what you're talking about John.
I get the feeling you're trying to be smug about something, but I don't really see what.
I don't see anyone making an argument as extreme as saying that tablet native journalism is impossible. I do think people are suggesting that narrowing their market may have been a key factor in exhausting their runway, and I think that's a reasonable question to ask.
But no one is presenting any statistical evidence either way, so a concept like correlation plays no part. We can quote cute maxims all day in order to try to sound smart, but if they aren't applicable to the discussion, what's the point other than as theater: an attempt at rhetorical persuasion by performing familiarity with irrelevant concepts.
As a separate topic, if you'll indulge my own theater:
The phrase "correlation is not causation" is broadly misunderstood as being a stronger criticism than it is. My way of summarizing this is that "correlation is not causation, but causation causes correlation." For a fully rigorous and enjoyable treatment of how causal concepts relate to statistical evidence I recommend Judea Pearl's book Causality, which elaborates the concepts for which he won the Turing prize. If you don't have time for the book, the epilog is up on the web a few different places and is a great summary.
Read the headline of the Felix Salmon blog post which Gruber was criticizing: "The impossibility of tablet-native journalism"
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/12/03/the-impossi...