Just watched the first part of the announcement of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily. It’s intriguing.
Murdoch’s points and some comments.
First, people really do want news. What they want, though, is surprise, and that’s not what legacy media generally provides. (If you think about it, that’s what Fox provides, to some extent: simply by having a different slant than the rest of the legacy media, it has more information content.)
Second, no one has found a way to make it make money yet. The problem is to provide news with a sustainable business model: purely advertising supported isn’t working on the Internet — advertising rates are way down, and every web provider is facing problems; almost all the top sites depend on angel investors.
Third, pulp is dead. The whole infrastructure of buying newsprint (or slick coated paper, for that matter), printing it, shipping it, and selling it is as antiquated as buggy whips, and as doomed, especially for ephemeral content like in most newspapers and magazines. As I’ve pointed out in several pieces here at PJM, the marginal cost of delivering a page of web content is about 10-8–10-9 times the cost of paper — one one-hundred millionth to one billionth.
Fourth, paper is dead. Not in the same sense as pulp. but because people now see how limited a few still pictures and text really are.
The Daily is responding to all these points. The content is new and won’t be available elsewhere on the web. The content is highly interactive — I’ll write a little more on the design in another post — and makes good use of the iPad’s capabilities. And the price (right now) is 99 cents a week, or about 14 cents a day. That’s a bit high yet, but it may make sense — a dollar seems like a good “Internet price” for a lot of things: enough to sound like you’re buying something, little enough to be an easy impulse buy.
Murdoch may be on to something: if he sells to a million viewers on average, that’s gross of a million dollars a week, and that’s only about 7 percent penetration into the iPad market.
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