“Some of the most interesting work in the future of news is happening in these apps — for instance, in The Daily, which is trying to both create an iPad-native experience and get people to pay 99 cents a week for it,” Joshua Benton reports for The Nieman Journalism Lab. “Information about The Daily’s success (or lack thereof) has been hard to come by; external guesstimates have gotten ‘no comments,’ and the closest thing to a hard number to come out of The Daily so far is its publisher’s statement that the app has been downloaded ‘hundreds of thousands’ of times.”
“So I set out to see if there was some way to use publicly available data to try to understand at The Daily’s readership,” Benton reports. “If I can’t know how many readers it has, perhaps I could find something that at least showed the broader trend line.”
Benton reports, “That’s how, with major help from the social media firm PostRank, I came up with the chart above, which suggests — at least when viewed through the lens of Twitter sharing — The Daily is losing audience over time rather than gaining it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Daily is losing audience because it’s a pain in the ass to read. It’s always been that way and it hasn’t improved rapidly enough. We do not want to be forced to learn several new paradigms for accessing content. We just want to read/view/watch/listen to the news. You can’t find anything painlessly in The Daily, so we stopped bothering. Also from News Corp., the “less ambitious” NY Post app for iPad is far better; it’s navigable without having to screw around pinching and swiping and tapping assorted crap, much of it hidden. Launch the NY Post app and you get their version of the news; that’s all we want.
We don’t want stupid UI puzzles, we just want the effing news!
The Daily needs to remove (or hide) the bells and whistles, open on the Table of Contents (or just copy The NY Post app) and KISS. Then we might consider launching The Daily on our iPads again. Maybe.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
I tried the Daily and was totally put off by its popular entertainment character. I want a news app. Not a glitzy entertainment app.
By the way check out NYT/skimmer. Pretty good web site, but not an app unfortunately.
http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer
Yeah, thought same thing.
Downloaded it, and just found it embarrassing.
(as if anything could embarrass Murdoch)
Try The Economist. Intelligent news on a good app. It delivers a free Editor’s Picks version each week, or you can subscribe for about twice what The Faily costs. And no idiotic Us Weekly crapola.
I find the daily very compelling, although too full of gossip news
Not willi g to pay 40 dollars a year… Woukd pay 15
I tried the Daily and did not like it. Too much like entertainment weekly.
I do like http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/#/Top+News
But it is a web site rather than an app. At least at this point.
The MDN take is dead on. Ease of access and fluidity are missing from so many of the new news apps. In fact, I don’t generally watch video at all and find navigation to be clunky. Simplicity. Simplicity, please.
I haven’t spent any of my hard-earned cash purchasing “The Daily,” because it is a Rupert Murdoch publication, plus the fact it hasn’t gotten good reviews.
The ones I access, on a regular basis, are the CNN, BBC News and MacWorld apps. All are feature rich and easy to navigate.
I started reading The New Yorker on my iPad. Not through their $5 per issue app, but in GoodReader. I’m a print subscriber anyway which costs about 1/10th what the iPad-specific issues cost, so I “print” a PDF of each issue from their subscriber-only Web archive and put them all on the iPad. I like reading them that way just fine! Indeed, it has me picking it up again, whereas the print issues have mostly gathered dust on the coffee table ever since I got used to doing most of my daily light reading on my iPhone. Sometimes when you want to read you just want to read— not watch videos or deal with other kinds of whiz-bang silliness!
Cleverly done!
the Daily’s news writing is weak and not diverse enough. More USA Today snippets of information. i still access my news from a paper newspaper (Globe & Mail) every morning. it’s old school, but very informative and a lot more interesting Canadian perspective in their writings.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for media companies to create news apps. Flipboard and Zite have the flow right. Why can’t they start there and enhance?
I find myself reading the Economist the most, great content at a reasonable cost.
I enjoy The Daily, but I am getting sick and tired of having to reboot my iPad every morning to get the new issue to download. Without a reboot, I get yesterdays issue!
I had the same problem. Plus it was sluggish. I decided to uninstall the app and reinstall it. Now it works flawlessly and is very responsive. Try that.
I like the Daily. I wish it was a little simpler, more news, and comic strips (I love newspaper comic strips). But I ponied up the $40, mostly because I was going to pay .99 weekly, and then didn’t want to feel like I was going to have to decide “do I still want this?” IMO, Zing is MUCH better experience, but I like the idea of having a one-stop shopping app.
I found The Daily’s content to be very boring. There was no real news on real issues that make a difference. I was hoping for at least some Fox News libertarian type content.
Very disappointed. Waste of time trying to even look through an issue.
Totally agree with MDN’s take. I really like Acrylic- it’s easy and nice to use, looks good, and gives me MY news.
I was going to subscribe to The Daily until the News360 App appeared. The Daily was just too clunky to navigate and use. Load times were also too slow as well for my liking. Add in no updates as the day progresses and I just didn’t feel the investment in a subscription was for me. The News360 has been a joy to use and resides as one of the main Apps in my iPad dock.
$25.99 a month for the Financial Times.
Worth every Penny.
Eat your heart out Murdoch.
The Financial Times is an excellent newspaper, though pricey. Makes the WSJ look like the local “Hooterville” paper by comparison.