12 more issues
The Twelve Days of Christmas it is not. News Corp announced the impending official closure of The Daily, a two-year, bazillion dollar effort to create a platform-specific online newspaper, focusing almost exclusively on Apple's iPads. With profitable entertainment properties splitting off from the (of course) less profitable news properties, much pressure has been building on The Daily to show its model to work. Until now, the latest word had been that the company would take another look and make a decision after the U.S. presidential elections.
The effort did pull in more than 100,000 paying subscribers, which implies roughly $4 million in gross subscription revenues, with an overhead including about 100 people.
Ad Age's Nat Ives points out that The Daily has had an outsized impression on the media industry, ascribing it to the intersection of some popular topics (News Corp, Apple) and, not insignificantly, the extremely rare behavior of a company going on a hiring spree for journalists of all things.
