July 31, 2012: Apple is laying off a third of the employees of its newspaper The Daily, created specifically for iPad users. This was a kind of recognition of the failure of the project to create their own news publications. The dismissal affected 50 editorial staff, who had to leave due to the low number of readers.
Since its launch in 2010, the iPad has had a huge following, so Apple thought it was a good idea to create a news app to further increase user engagement. Steve Jobs himself met with the heads of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to get them interested in the project.
Apple’s mistake was that instead of bringing digital innovation to the work of media giants with the help of new technologies, it created News Corp with The Daily news publication, exclusively for its tablet.
The Daily: an innovative project that became a failure
The idea of creating The Daily looked quite tempting at the first stage, offering readers traditional news content with the inclusion of interactive elements.
Rupert Murdoch invested $30 million in The Daily, which was budgeted at $500,000 a week. The subscription cost users $0.99 per week. Of this amount, News Corp received $0.7, including any advertising. In its first year of existence, The Daily received only 100,000 paid subscribers, while for profit their number had to exceed 715,000. The loss was more than $30 million.
The problem was not only content and pricing, but also news file sizes, which could take up to 15 minutes to download.
Ultimately, the experiment ended in failure, and on December 3, 2012, News Corp announced that it was no longer publishing a newspaper for the iPad.
Now, with the launch of Apple’s News+ news service, the company is making yet another push to become a publishing mogul.
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