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

[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.

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.

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

[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.