News Corp's The Daily iPad App Shutting Down On December 15

An anonymous reader writes with news that, as predicted, the iPad only newspaper The Daily failed. From the article: "The goal of The Daily was to provide a modern spin on the news cycle by delivering world news draped in a multimedia experience. In other words, The Daily devoted a lot of resources towards adding photos, video, and touch controls to news stories that would otherwise be static. ... It was announced today that The Daily will be closing up shop on December 15 after failing to rake in the dough."

Comments

The Daily did not understand the web

[osssmkatz]

The Daily had OK content. But they did not understand the web. More than once, I took advantage of their trial period, would read a little bit of the daily paper, only to find that the next one had been delivered erasing the previous content. There was no archive, despite continual promises to add one. I told them I would subscribe as soon as they added this feature. Also, why did they require an app to get the content? That meant it wasn't linkable, was restricted to only one device, and couldn't easily be shared.

Re:The Daily did not understand the web

[mea_culpa]

The content was interlaced with intrusive adverts that seemed to take over. In a magazine you could easily flip over the ads and even read ads that caught your eye. The Daily put them front and center in your face. People aren't used to paying for apps and being force-fed ads.
This and the mostly homogenized content was enough for me to uninstall it.

Re:The Daily did not understand the web

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Didn't understand it?

I'd say that they loathed everything about it and built accordingly:

The Web? If you put it up there, somebody probably has a cache even if you take it down. The Daily? Either the memory hole was a deliberate feature, or their developers somehow managed to miss some awfully basic lessons on content storage and organization. The Web? More or less works on anything with enough RAM for a browser. The Daily? Works with a single, blessed, app for a single platform. The Web? It isn't called 'the web' because linking is difficult... The Daily? Not so much.

I'm not on the 'zOMG, HTML5 4 lyfe! We should replace all native binaries with javascript that bit-bangs a canvas tag to provide the lousiest graphics performance since the introduction of the "2D accelerator" back in the day!' bandwagon; but I am deeply underimpressed by the fad of creating 'apps' that are little more than the platform's HTML engine wrapped in enough vendor-specific shitsauce that you can't call the result a webpage anymore. It appears to be for 'mobile' what building website menu structures entirely in Flash for no obvious reason whatsoever was to the web of old.

Re:The Daily did not understand the web

[pete6677]

Too many news websites, like this Daily bullshit, have way too many stupid fucking videos. If I wanted to watch TV I'd watch TV. Yet another sign of the continued dumbing down of America (possibly the entire world).

Re:The Daily did not understand the web

[hairyfish]

It's not the fact that it has ads, it's nature in which they are delivered. I read my local paper online and ads just sit there on the side of the page like a conventional paper. Like a regular paper I can choose to read the ads or not. But if they were forced onto me full screen so I have to actually click something to move them away before being allowed to read my paper, then I will not read that paper any more. That strategy was doomed from the beginning.

Re:The Daily did not understand the web

[Rich0]

Yup - this is why internet advertising is so reviled.

A newspaper is a page of black and white articles with some black and white ads nearby.

An online newspaper is a page of black and white articles, with some subset of:
1. Full color ads.
2. Ads that contain motion within them.
3. Ads that stay on screen even as you read down the page.
4. Ads that move around within the screen.
5. Ads that actually pop up over top of the article you're trying to read, and you get to try to close them.
6. Ads that do dynamic stuff that is broken on the browser you're using, so you have to resort to hacks like selecting text to try to get the page to scroll it out of the way of the text you're reading.
7. Ads that actually try to force you to watch them by blocking content and enforcing a time delay.
8. Ads that actually give you a quiz on the presented material before letting you see the article. (Yes, I've actually seen this.)

People don't have some kind of revulsion for online ads simply because they're online. People just hate ads that are intrusive. The last time I went to a play there were ads in the playbill, and I didn't care. Before the play started somebody thanked and named a sponsor or two, and I didn't care. Now, if in the middle of Act 1 Bozo the clown jumped in front of me and started waving signs and blowing his horns, then I'd care.

An Object Lesson For Web Site Designers

[Press2ToContinue]

I firmly believe there are two groups of people: those who want information to "feed" them (passive learners) and those who want to drive the learning experience (active learners.) The passive learners want to have information pushed on them, and have it entertain them and distract them, a la Mythbusters style. The active learners don't want their information to move, wiggle, flash or distract them. They have decided what they want to know and are trying to learn it quickly and efficiently. The active learners go to great pains to get websites to stop moving, flashing, spinning and otherwise try to grab their attention so they can focus on their reading. The passive learners (children, those without a learning goal) would not complain about distractions on websites, instead they seek them out, but generally would not be seeking studious information anyway. Probably more the entertainment and sensational-style news-consumers I would think.

I believe this "newspaper" experiment points out that their target audience consisted of a more mature customer, active-learner, seeking "newspaper-style" news and prefered to drive the experience and learn quickly and efficiently. I don't believe the experiment failed, I think they just misunderstood their audience.

Perhaps if they had tried that with news aimed at grade-school age children they would have found a different acceptance rate.

Re:An Object Lesson For Web Site Designers

[Quiet_Desperation]

There's two types of people: those who think there's only two types of people and clear thinkers. :-)

But seriously, stop with these monochromatic views of the world already. It's destroying us as a society.

Most people will fall into both categories on different topics. Sometimes I want the deep knowledge you can only get a from a book with lots of very detailed text and diagrams. Other times, yeah, I want Mythbusters, and anyone who thinks less of me for that is warmly welcomed to piss off and croak.

Re:An Object Lesson For Web Site Designers

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure that the grandparent poster's distinction is drawn quite correctly; but I'd argue that it does fall somewhere near the truth. It isn't really the activity or passivity of the learning that differs; but the activity or passivity of the volition to seek out information according to some internal objective, vs. a willingness to attend to whatever information a nearby stimulus is providing.

That said, the distinction is only really sharp in somewhat extreme or rather contrived cases: 'Child who reads about stuff for fun vs. child who listens in class and delivers solid Bs, and doesn't touch a data source at all on vacations and weekends' type of thing. In situations where you don't necessarily know what you don't know, the 'active' learner will also function by seeking out people or reference material that know more than he does and listening to them, just as the 'passive' will(if it will be on the test, of course).

The other confounding factor is probably reading speed. People vary widely, surprisingly widely even within similar educational and social backgrounds, in how fast they can read. In my experience, it seems that people who can read atypically fast, substantially faster than 'normal' speaking pace, tend to find assorted 'multimedia enriched content', 'educational TV' and even informational radio rather galling unless used purely as background noise for a primary task.

People who read as, or more, slowly than a normal speaking speed, though, tend to enjoy audio and audiovisual information presentation much more. It seems sensible enough: without rather clever algorithms(which are rarely used for this purpose) you can't speed up audio without going all Alvin and the Chipmunks on it, and people don't. Text, though, (aside from messy typography questions which can make things more or less legible) is read at a pace controlled by the viewer, not the producer. If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.

Management Charlie Foxtrot

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC for obvious reasons.

I interviewed for a job to fix their platform architecture and duck-tape together a proper QA setup for them almost a year ago. What a bunch of idiots! HR and my (thank god) not-to-be manager were absolutely clueless, had no idea what they were talking about and were blatantly unprofessional. The office was "Everyone has a 27-inch iMac and a matching 27-inch thunderbolt display" kinda tech (I'm not joking) and the their 'tech guy' who dropped in the interview asked, "I see PHP on your resume. That's a scripting language, right?" I couldn't make this shit up. Somehow this bunch of incompetent fools managed to turn out a digital publication, no wonder they failed.

Another NewsCorp entity tried to hire me for an iOS QA lead role, and they constantly complained about the quality of their developers. First, I was shocked they could even try to recognize quality, but then I realized that having to wear a tie M-F (non-negotiable) and arriving strictly at 9am, with no perks to speak of, yeah, they were only going to get shitty iOS developers.

Re:Management Charlie Foxtrot

[Quiet_Desperation]

Ties? Seriously? I'm in charge of multimillion dollar R&D involving stuff that gets shot into space and I wear polo shirts, jeans and sneakers daily. Even customer meetings are just slacks and dress shirts, but I have some awesome space themed ties that I like to wear for those.

People need to wake up and realize "dress for success" was invented by clothing manufacturers.

Re:Management Charlie Foxtrot

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.

Clearly, if you were dressing for success properly you wouldn't be scoffing at those prices. Perhaps you'd be interested in a motivational seminar, a penny-stock scam, or some usurious consumer credit?

Re:Management Charlie Foxtrot

[DNS-and-BIND]

Do you REALLY not understand, or is this one of those play-acting things where someone pretends not to understand to "show how ridiculous society is". Showing up in a suit says, in our ridiculous society's unspoken language, "I'm serious about this job and I'm willing to conform to your expectations." It's just something that's expected to get any decent job, much like a college degree. Guess what: every society has its unspoken rituals and if you don't conform to them you won't be accepted as a member of that society.

If you're one of those "oh, that's such bullshit, I would never do that to get a job" then congratulations for having such remarkable skills that you can shrug off job offers. It may be news to you that the rest of us don't enjoy such luxuries. But then again, you're the only one who sees the societal dysfunction at play, so I'm guessing you're not really used to thinking outside yourself.

And nothing of value was lost..

[Roogna]

If the media companies can't figure out that charging people to view ads is no longer a workable business model, well then... can't help 'em.

NewsFail

[mjwx]

OK, Murdoch couldn't even get money out of Apple users. I think it's time for him to admit he has no idea what he is doing.

Good news!

[onyxruby]

This is good news, and not because of the politics of News Corp. If this had been 'successful' you would be seeing a /lot/ more companies charging for online content. As anyone who has ever subscribed to a magazine, paid for a newspaper or bought cable knows, paying for your media doesn't save you from advertising.

The news has become a commodity, and with media sites outsourcing most of their work with Reuters and the Associated Press they have also outsourced their identity. Frankly for most people it doesn't matter whether they get their news from Toledo or Seattle because it's all the same news.

I've said before and I'll say again that there are two ways for a media site to succeed on the Internet. Two rules - eight words.
1. Your user experience matters.
2. Create relevant quality content.

If you obey those two rules you can and will do well online. Look at the Wall Street Journal, they charge for a lot of their content and still make money, why? The user experience isn't user hostile and the experience of using their web site is fairly pleasant. They also create unique content through their own journalism with quality stories. The New York Time is in a similar situation.

By following these two simple adages they make a lot of money compared to their competitors. One of these publications leans left politically, the other leans right and yet they both succeed where others fall flat.