Why ‘The Daily’ Failed

Monday, 3 December 2012

With the benefit of hindsight, there seem to be at least two other major lessons from The Daily’s failure:

Audience clarity. It was difficult to grasp who exactly was the intended audience of The Daily. It excelled at interactive elements and visual appeal, but the contents were so sprawling and varied that it was tough to know who this publication was speaking for and to.

One platform isn’t enough. The Daily was first imagined as the daily news magazine for the iPad era. Going with a tablet-first strategy was a great, ambitious idea. But going with a tablet-only strategy? In hindsight, questionable.

#1 I agree with. The Daily had no personality, no focus. It wasn’t tawdry enough to be a New York Post-style tabloid, and wasn’t serious enough to compete with the New York Times. #2 I completely disagree with. Correlation is not causation, and I see no evidence that going tablet-only led to The Daily’s demise.

I have my own two-item list of lessons to be learned from The Daily:

1. Don’t Suck

The Daily launched with a tremendous amount of publicity, aided and abetted by Apple itself — Eddy Cue was on stage for the announcement. But the app sucked. Daily issues were almost mind-bogglingly slow to download, and even once downloaded, animations and page turning were slow, and navigation was confusing. The Daily garnered a lot of attention right out of the gate but had software that left a very poor first impression. That was a huge mistake and missed opportunity.

In the time since they launched, their software improved and download sizes shrunk, but it still wasn’t great. They never seemed to treat software engineering and design as a primary function of the publication. They were competing as much against Flipboard as they were The New York Times, but didn’t seem to realize it.

2. Start Small

The Daily claims over 100,000 subscribers, each paying either $4/month or $40/year. Let’s round down and assume they’re all paying just $40/year. That’s $4 million a year. Apple took 30 percent of that, leaving The Daily with about $3 million. Plus, whatever advertising revenue The Daily generated was entirely theirs to keep. With 100,000 subscribers that should be worth at least $1 million per year, and I’d say that’s very conservative. (Traditionally, newspapers and magazines generated significantly more revenue from advertisers than subscriptions and newsstand sales.)

But look at The Daily’s actual expenses (quoting again from Sonderman’s Poynter piece):

With expenses running at about a half million dollars a week, the publication would have needed near 500,000 subscribers at $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year just to break even. So one big failing was the business model.

They set up an operation with $25 million a year in expenses. But there’s no reason why a daily iPad newspaper needs that sort of budget. A daily iPad newspaper of the scope of The Daily might (but I doubt it), but that simply means the scope of The Daily was ill-conceived. News Corporation went no further than taking the newspaper as we know it — the newspaper as defined by the pre-Internet 20th century — and cramming it into an iPad wrapper. You can’t tell me a good daily iPad newspaper couldn’t be run profitably for $5 million a year.

Maybe “newspaper” is the wrong term, because it carries so much historical baggage. Just think: daily news app. You don’t necessarily need the scope of a traditional newspaper, with entire sections dedicated to business, entertainment, and sports. (Sports is particularly problematic for a national publication.) Those sections only made sense in the pre-Web world where most people had no other source of daily news than their local newspaper. My advice to a would-be daily news app today would be to simply do the A section: the front page, breaking news, major national and world news, and opinion. There’s no way you need $25 million per year to do that.

The Daily as Proof of Anything

The usually-savvy Felix Salmon has drawn some ill-considered conclusions from The Daily’s demise, declaring “The Impossibility of Tablet-Native Journalism”:

News apps, it has become clear, are unwieldy and clunky things. Every issue of a new publication has to be downloaded in full before it can be opened; this takes a surprisingly long time, even over a pretty fast wifi connection. That’s one reason why web apps can be superior to native apps: no one would dream of forcing people to download a whole website before they could view a single page.

On top of that, the iPad’s native architecture is severely constrained in many ways. Look at any publication you’re reading in an iPad app, and search for a story. Oh, wait — you can’t: search is basically impossible within iPad apps, which at heart are little more than heavy PDF files, weighed down with multimedia bells and whistles. Navigation is always difficult and unintuitive, and pages are never remotely as dynamic as what we’ve become used to on the web. This wasn’t The Daily’s fault. Again, take any native iPad publication at all. Read to the end of a story, and then see how many headlines you can click on: which stories are you being given the choice to read next? The answer is probably none, and again the reason for that is built deep into the architecture of the iPad, and of other tablets too.

That most existing iPad magazine apps are slow, badly-designed, can’t search, etc. does not mean iPad magazine apps cannot be fast, well-designed, and searchable. Salmon says “This wasn’t The Daily’s fault” but he’s 180 degrees wrong. All of these problems were entirely The Daily’s fault.

All impossible tasks have not been accomplished; but not all tasks that have not yet been accomplished are impossible. When it comes to media, what strikes many as The Daily’s cardinal sin is eschewing the open Web for the closed garden of a subscriber-only iOS app. The idea being that you can’t win without a web-first strategy. But that’s what “everyone” said about social networks too — until Instagram came along and became a sensation with an iPhone-only strategy.

Ben Jackson has a fine response to Salmon:

If you’re publishing on the iPad, you’re basically a designer rather than a coder, and you’re far more limited in what you can do.

No, you’re not, unless you can’t find a coder willing to work with you. Use Adobe Publishing Suite, and yes, you will have no control over the code. But that’s a far cry from some mythical limitation on publishing apps which prevents them from deviating from the horrible implementations we’ve seen thus far.

Exactly. A news app needs to care about its software to the same high degree that print publications care about their paper, page design, and distribution.

Concluding, Jackson gets it half right:

Publishing for a single platform, whether print, web, or the iPad, is a foolish move, and I think we knew that before The Daily was excised from News Corp.’s balance sheet. But to write tablet publishing off entirely due to one poorly-planned app from a massive traditional publisher would be terribly short-sighted.

The second part I agree with. The Daily’s failure had nothing to do with it being iPad-only and everything to do with the fact that it just plain stunk.

But what’s foolish about publishing on a single platform? I publish only on the web, and Daring Fireball seems to be doing OK. Marco Arment’s The Magazine publishes only for iOS and is doing well enough that he’s already expanded to hire an editor. In fact, I’d go so far as to say The Daily’s success proves the opposite of Salmon’s conclusion: that an iPad-only daily news app could be a success.

Their success was that they got over 100,000 readers to pay at least $40 per year for a subscription. How many digital publications can say that? Not many. And the iPad — with Apple’s simple, trusted, familiar payment mechanism — made that possible. The Daily’s problem was simply that they weren’t conceived to operate on $5 or $6 million per year in revenue. A smarter, smaller team could. ★

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Observations on iTunes 11

Thursday, 29 November 2012

There are redesigns and there are redesigns. This one’s the real deal. It’s not a rewrite though. Clearly, in its heart, under the hood, this is still the same iTunes. It’s what you see (at least in the main window; see below) that’s all new. That’s not a complaint, and it shouldn’t be surprising. iTunes 11 still does — at least as far as I can tell — everything that iTunes 10 did. Apple has addressed the biggest problem with iTunes 10: its presentation was severely cluttered.

My first impression of the new design: impressed. I thought the same thing when I saw the demo at the music event in September, and playing with it here for a few hours reinforces it — iTunes 11 is in many ways a redefinition of what it means to be a modern Mac app. There’s an iOS-inspired emphasis on putting less stuff in your face at the same time. Moving away from the sidebar design pattern really works here. Fewer simple textual table views, more and bigger graphics. (The old-style sidebar interface is still there if you want it: View → Show Sidebar. But I say give the new one a chance.) With the old sidebar interface, everything was treated, semantically, as a peer. Everything from your media libraries (music, movies, podcasts) to playlists to devices (iPods, iPhones, iPads) to the entire iTunes Store — all these widely disparate things were presented together in a single (albeit segmented) list.

The new presentation is far more logical, based on a simple horizontal bar atop the window. Libraries (including Home Sharing libraries) are in a popover-ish menu on the left. Segmented tabs in the center specify the view of the thing you’re looking at (e.g. Songs/Albums/Artists/Genres/Videos/Playlists/Match for Music). Then on the right, two buttons: Devices and Store. Click Devices and you get an informative popover listing all available devices managed by this device; the listing shows available storage and, for devices connected by USB, battery charge status.

Kicking It Old-School

Outside the main window and new MiniPlayer, not much has changed. (See next item, re: the Preferences window.) Even some of the new features, like Up Next, sport decidedly old-school dialog boxes, like this one, which Dan Moren aptly describes as the “most annoying dialog box in iTunes 11”. Pretty much every dialog box is unchanged from iTunes 10 and prior — Get Info, for example.

You Can Pry iTunes’s Modal Preferences Dialog From Its Cold Dead Hands

What’s the deal here? Does Apple have a single other remaining app with a modal preferences dialog? I have a sort of soft spot for it, though. It’s like the last remaining vestige of classic Mac OS.

Expanded View

I think my favorite new design element is what Apple is calling “Expanded View”. In a graphical list of albums or movies or shows, you click one and it opens in a subview right there under the album/movie/show. Instead of going to a new view, you stay where you are. No way to get confused about where you are, more of a sense of direct manipulation. I think this is a brilliant design for everyone, particularly typical users. And there’s a neat trick: the colors for the song listing are chosen algorithmically based on the album or poster art. (Examples: here and here.) Very clever, very fun. It’s a digital approximation of going through real-world albums or DVD jewel boxes and opening them in place — with the custom color palettes, the listings feel like the “inside” of the albums.

AppleScript Still Works

Even in new views like Expanded View, selected tracks work in AppleScript just like they have in standard table views. I can’t vouch that every old AppleScript still works, but the ones I use do. (I always worry about AppleScript going away as iOS influences the Mac.)

Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes (easily the best resource for iTunes AppleScript information) has already found a few bugs, though.

Helvetica

Everything in the main window is set in Helvetica. Looks good on regular Macs, looks downright gorgeous on a retina MacBook Pro. More credence to my hunch that Lucida Grande’s days as the OS X system font are numbered.

Animation, or Lack Thereof

iTunes 11 is not as animated as I’ve come to expect from iOS. It simply zaps between full and mini-player state, for example. Why not zoom, like a window going into the Dock? (See below for the answer.) No iBooks-style secret-door-flip rotation when switching from your library to the iTunes Store, either. (Expanded View is animated, though.)

Up Next

This is pretty much how I always wanted the old Party Shuffle feature to work — show me what’s coming up, and let me add whatever strikes me to the top of the queue. But I suspect people who liked the old Party Shuffle feature are going to be upset, because Up Next replaces it.

A nice touch: on regular displays, the Up Next icon is a bullet list. But on retina displays, it’s a numbered list with minuscule numerals.

MiniPlayer

If I recall correctly, on stage at the music event in September when iTunes 11 was previewed, Jeff Robbin explicitly stated that their goal with the redesigned MiniPlayer was to allow you to do almost everything you’d want music-playback-wise without leaving the MiniPlayer mode. I think they got pretty close.

Except it’s not actually a mode anymore. Previously, MiniPlayer was a separate mode of the main iTunes window. You toggled it with the standard zoom button in the window title bar — the green one with the “+” when you hover over it. (Which in turn meant that if you wanted the standard zoom button behavior of zooming the window, you had to Option-click the button.)

Now in iTunes 11, MiniPlayer is actually a separate window from the main iTunes window. The green zoom button now behaves like a standard one, and they’ve added a new MiniPlayer toggle button in the top right corner, next to the standard full-screen mode button. This title bar button acts like a modal switch: click it in the regular window, and the regular window closes and the MiniPlayer opens; click it in the MiniPlayer and vice-versa. But, in iTunes’s Window menu, you can open both the main window (“iTunes”) and the MiniPlayer at the same time. There are two separate MiniPlayer items in the Window menu, in fact: “MiniPlayer”, which just opens the MiniPlayer window and keeps the main window open; and “Switch to MiniPlayer”, which acts like the title bar toggle button.

That they’re really two separate windows is, I can only guess, why there’s no zoom animation when toggling. I still think they should animate the toggling somehow, though.

Update: It’d be nice if you could keep using the MiniPlayer while the main window is in full screen mode, but alas, that doesn’t work. Even with both windows open, when you full screen the main window, the MiniPlayer disappears until you un-full screen it. ★

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

Why ‘The Daily’ Failed

Monday, 3 December 2012

1. Don’t Suck

2. Start Small

The Daily as Proof of Anything

Monday, 3 December 2012

Saturday, 1 December 2012

Friday, 30 November 2012

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Observations on iTunes 11

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Kicking It Old-School

You Can Pry iTunes’s Modal Preferences Dialog From Its Cold Dead Hands

Expanded View

AppleScript Still Works

Helvetica

Animation, or Lack Thereof

Up Next

MiniPlayer

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Best Dell Ad Ever

Tuesday, 13 November 2012