People Read Murdoch's The Daily, But That Number Could Be Falling Rapidly - Report
April 5, 2011
It debuted in February with much fanfare, but The Daily is losing its audience rather than gaining it, according to a new study by Nieman Journalism Lab. The Harvard-based organization looked at Twitter patterns to reach its conclusion.
The Daily, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, debuted for the iPad on February 3, becoming the tablet’s first daily newspaper. It includes sections on global news, sports, opinion, entertainment, and technology.
Interestingly, although it debuted with a free two-week trial, The Daily did not become a paid app until late last month. Unfortunately, that milestone only accelerated the publications' loss of readers, a slide started soon after its debut, according to Nieman's analysis.
Their survey, which reviews the number of times users tweet an article using The Daily app, shows a steady decline in interest. This is especially true since the app began charging for its content on March 21.
They state:
(The Daily’s) activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.Since its debut, just 6,026 tweets were generated within The Daily app. On its first full day of release, The Daily generated 387 tweets. One week later, that number was down to 209. Finally, one week later, it fell to just 104 tweets. Nieman admits counting the number of tweets made from within The Daily app is not the same as counting the number of active subscribers. Without that information being made available, however, it gives an approximation of how well the app is performing. And it isn’t good. What do you think? Leave your comments below.
