The Daily, the News Corp publication that launched exclusively on the iPad one year ago Thursday, is setting its sites beyond tablets in 2012.
The publication has amassed more than 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad, making it the third top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes Store last year. Of those 100,000, about half pay
The Daily‘s $0.99 per week subscription fee, and the other half are annual ($39.99 per year) subscribers, according to publisher Greg Clayman.
Earlier this month,
The Daily launched its first Android edition for Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets. Now the digital newspaper is gearing up to release versions for iPhone and Android smartphones “in the next month or two,” says Clayman, thereby making its content available to the millions of consumers who own smartphones but not tablets. It will also allow existing subscribers to more easily access
The Daily‘s updates throughout the day.
We spoke to Clayman about
The Daily‘s first year and what lies ahead for 2012. An edited transcript of our phone interview can be found below.
Q&A With Greg Clayman, Publisher of The Daily
n some senses, The Daily‘s exclusive launch on the iPad was a progressive embrace of new technology — one that many thought was ahead of its time. Then again, most publications have been laboring to bring their content to as many devices, screens and platforms as possible, whereas The Daily limited itself by being available only on one.
We were very specific about designing a native daily news experience for a tablet. As we start to look at smartphones, we’re having to rethink what a daily news consumption experience should be like on that device. We’re known for very visual graphics, stunning photography and ease of use, which is difficult to translate to iPhone.
Will you ever have a website?We’ve spent a lot of time looking at
The New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal and their paywalls, as well as sites without paywalls like
The Huffington Post, to determine the best business model. On the iPad, we know what the model is. Apple has a great subscription service and an awesome thing called Newsstand, and that’s how we monetize. One click and you pay for it, very straightforward. On the web there’s a series of different models, and there’s issues about what kinds of paywalls work, and what content you put in front and behind a paywall, and whether it’s metered or usage-based. These are all questions that people are still debating across the industry. We’re keeping an eye on all of those.
So is it fair to say that you’re having discussions about building a website, but that nothing is in production?That’s about right. I’d say we’re focused on the mobile space and mobile users.
Earlier this month you launched your first edition for Android tablets. What have been the challenges of formatting for a new operating system?There are two challenges. One is the sort of format layout, look, feel. The second is the coding. On the layout side, what we do on the iPad and what we do on the Android tablet looks almost exactly the same. There is some difficulty with Android in terms of navigation — it has a built-in back button and contextual menu, for instance — which you can design for but don’t need to. What is very different is underlying code. The beauty of iOS is that if you build one tablet app, one iPhone app, and it works across all the devices instantly. Challenge we all face with Android is that there are different iterations of the operating systems — Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, etc. — and we need to develop slightly different iterations for each handsets. That’s why, when you develop for Android, people talking about how it’s a longer process.
How did you have to adjust the workflow for publishing on two tablet OSes instead of one?On the backend, we had to build into our CMS the ability to publish simultaneously on multiple different platform types. Now, when we create a story or article in CMS, it automatically publishes to both the Android and the iOS tablet. On the front end, we had to add a level of QA. If you’re reviewing a song, for instance, you have to make sure it links to the iTunes Store on the iPad and the Google store on an Android. Before we hit publish every night and throughout the day, editors are actually looking at [stories] across the various tablets we publish to, and tweaking if necessary on the fly.
Are you thinking about an app for Windows Phone 7?It’s something we do talk about. I really like the OS; it’s really, really cool. We want to be wherever our readers are. There are more people using Android and iPhones than Windows phones, but as the Windows Phone platform gains more traction in the market, I expect we’ll end up there too.
Why keep building apps? Why not just build for the mobile web?One of the challenges of mobile app development and mobile publishing overall is that every time there is a new upgrade to an operating system — every time Android comes out with a new OS, or Apple releases an update to iOS 5, essentially — you need to make sure your code is optimized for the OS that it’s running. It’s hard enough when you’re an app. When you’re an app and a publishing platform, you have to make sure your app is optimized and that your backend publishing system continues to be upgraded so that everything keeps moving. That’s the app world. On the web, you design a website, make sure you’re compatible with browsers, and you’re good. For the most part that’s a simpler process. When will we need apps anymore? When will HTML5 power every game and every media type, and be heart of every app? I am very excited about that. It’s just not here yet. There’s so much more you can do with native code in terms of functionality and fluidity right now, although HTML5 is getting better every day.
You spoke about your strengths earlier — about having great design and stunning photography. Yet few think of The Daily as a breaking news publication, as a source for scoops. I think of you as a highly visual morning news aggregator. Is that what you want your journalism to be known for?From a journalistic standpoint, we did a good job in our first year. Paula Deen, the woman who does all the high fat cooking and is one of the bestselling chef personalities, well it turns out
she’d given herself diabetes, and we broke that. That became a national story. When Alec Baldwin wanted to run for mayor of New York,
we broke that. We released an exclusive video of Miley Cyrus that
got onto Entertainment Tonight. We have a team of journalists who continue to break stories and write original content. You can’t overestimate the importance of that. I use Pulse and other aggregators — Flipboard, Zite, News.me, etc. — all the time. That game is about who can make the best experience for aggregating original content. But we’re in the category of creating original content.
What have you learned about tablet advertising?Sometimes the really simple ads are the ones that get a lot of great response. That being said, the tablet affords advertisers a tremendous amount of creativity, and we’ve seen some really great ads. We’re helping advertisers understand how people are interacting with the ads. Are readers holding the tablets vertically or horizontally? Where do they click on the page? What kinds of interactivity are tablets driving? We share every single piece of data we can.
How do you get demographic information when Apple doesn’t share that with you?A couple of different ways. One is that we do surveys, which people love to respond to. The second is when you subscribe to
The Daily Apple provides the opportunity to share your data with the publisher. Once someone has opted in to that, you hand over your zip code and email address. We then use Nielsen’s geography data to determine their demographics.
Is profitability in sight?Sure. Over the next couple of years. From what I’ve seen, the average time it takes for a new magazine publication to get profitable is five to seven years. We’re on track to be ahead of that, which is great. When you calculate magazine profitability, you have to take into account the rising costs of paper and ink. We don’t have any of those costs. We’re in a very good place.
How else would you characterize your evolution over the last year?A year ago we didn’t have readers yet, we were’t in the market and we didn’t have firsthand experience on the platform yet. It’s very different when 20 people are playing in a lab, versus thousands of people who are using [your product] constantly and giving you feedback. A year ago it was about launching, about getting it into the market quickly, and now it’s about listening and understanding how people use it, what do they want more or less of, where they are going and where the are platforms going. We now have a fully baked, fully functional app CMS, and a large, engaged readership. A year ago we were asking how to build the boat. Now it’s about understanding the best way to steer the boat.
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