“‘In the quarter, we have lost about $10 million on The Daily,’ News Corp. president Chase Carey told analysts on the group’s Q3 earnings call,” Robert Andrews reports for paidContent. “A colleague also said The Daily has seen 800,000 downloads since launch.”
“A News Corp. spokesperson later told us the download count is now higher than 800,000,” Andrews reports. “The ‘loss’ is mostly due to investment costs because the app has only just gone paid.”
“Asked on the call, by my colleague Staci Kramer, Carey refused to disclose The Daily‘s free trial to paid subscription conversion ratio. ‘We’re not going to build this in a fishbowl,’ he said. That sort of detailed information is not something we’re going to share publicly at this point,” Andrews reports. “‘It’s really early days,’ Carey said. ‘It’s only a month-plus that it’s been pay-based. It’s actually one of the most downloaded news apps out there. It’s a work-in-progress, we’re proving the technology, refining the content – the tablet market is still in its infancy.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last month: 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.]
Related article:
Twitter data suggests News Corp.’s The Daily iPad news app is losing audience – April 6, 2011