The Daily shows signs of heavy decline

I’ve been fairly critical of Rupert Murdoch’s new digital newspaper The Daily, both over the ludicrously large investment News Corp. has made in the property, and the subsequent missteps in terms of social integration and target market. Murdoch himself said at the paper’s launch that it would need in the vicinity of 800,000 subscribers – each paying the 99 cent weekly fee – to be viable.

Today Joshua Benton has posted the first part of a very insightful piece on Nieman Journalism Lab, analysing the size of The Daily from publicly accessible information – specifically the number of tweets generating by The Daily’s article sharing facility. Given that this is a major endeavour by one of the world’s largest corporations, so far costing around $34 million to set up and launch – how many tweets do you think The Daily app is generating per day? Ten thousand? One thousand? Five hundred? Think a little smaller – try 50. Ouch.

Of course, News Corp. would most likely argue that they’re more concerned with what’s going on inside The Daily’s ecosystem, where all those paying customers are, than data which is, at best, only vaguely representative. However it’s the trend of the tweets that is more interesting than the volume – since launch the number of tweets generated has dropped by over 75%, and is still falling. After the initial post-launch drop-off experienced by all Internet properties, rather than levelling out and picking up the number of tweets has continued to fall, seeing another sudden decline around the time the free trial ran out.

The makers of The Daily say it has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands of times,” so maybe those reading are simply a selfish bunch who don’t like sharing.

If we take a ballpark figure, say Rupert’s magical 800,000, as the current download figure, and reduce it by 75% (in line with the fall in Twitter traffic), we are left with 200,000 subscribers and falling. Not enough to make the publication a viable property, and with Murdoch estimating running costs at $500,000 per week, not even enough to pay the bills.