Why The Daily may be the future of newspapers

Wednesday saw the unveiling of the first-ever, iPad-only newspaper—The Daily. And this newest member of the Newscorp family might be the game changer people have been waiting for. 

Newspaper and magazine publishers have struggled with their online approach. For years major newspapers and magazines have provided their content free of charge to online readers. Some tinkered with the idea of pay walls, like the New York Newsday, only to take them down after online subscriptions failed to materialize. Recently, the New York Times announced that they were instituting a pay wall. Unfortunately, most of the data shows that these pay walls don't work very well. Add to the mix that recent studies have also shown that iPad magazine subscriptions are on the decline.

So why will this new newspaper fare better than the rest? Three reasons: timing, price, and technology. 

As there is more and more talk about pay walls and paying for content, people are beginning to come around to the idea and their resistance to paying for content is eroding. Last month a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which we highlighted in a previous blog post, showed that people seem to be willing to pay for content online. So it seems that The Daily is striking while the public sentiment is swaying towards a payment model. 

As for price, The Daily's subscription model is only $0.99 per week, or $39.99 a year. This is far lower than what the New York Times will reportedly charge—a monthly subscription rate somewhere right under $20. The $0.99 price point is also well within the parameters people have stated that they are willing to spend on online content. Murdoch also stated at the press conference that the cost to run The Daily comes out to a mere $500K a week. This means that The Daily will only need 500K weekly subscribers to break even. That's only 6.5% of the roughly 7.5 million + iPads that were reportedly sold between its debut and the end of October. Murdoch mentioned that they will be creating The Daily for other tablet OS. This also bodes well for The Daily's success considering that Forrester Research is predicting the tablet market in the US to grow to 24 million units in 2011 and 82 million units by 2015. 

 However, the biggest reason that The Daily will succeed—and what makes it different from any previous publishing attempt—is how it was developed. The Daily was created specifically for the iPad. As Murdoch said in the press conference (which is also reiterated on The Daily web site "it was built from scratch." As such, it has been able to take advantage of the iPad’s amazing technology incorporating interactivity, videos, and gaming applications. It even uses the iPad's orientation feature to bring readers stunning visuals in landscape mode and with a flip to portrait mode it brings up the article. It's not a retrofitted newspaper trying to bring its content online. It had the luxury of reimagining the idea of distributing news content to an online audience. It also didn't have the burden of transitioning an established newspaper brand. It can create its own brand. Subscribers won't see this as having to pay for content that they can get for free because they can't get The Daily's content anywhere else. 

And considering that The Daily became the number one free app in its first day out with over 1450 ratings within its first 12 hours it was available, I'd say that The Daily has at least gotten off to a good start. 

What do you think? Will The Daily be a success? Will this change the publishing landscape forever?

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