Yesterday Rupert Murdoch announced the end of 'The Daily' for the iPad. Media gone wild but actually the failure is no surprise.
Rupert Murdoch is a clever man who invested a lot of money in his tablet product very early. He was one of the men who did understand that a tablet magazine cannot be a print-derivate and also costs money you won't get back after just a few months.
Nevertheless he now realized that it is too expensive to keep the production of 'The Daily' for iPad. Here are some reasons why the magazine has failed:
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Costs: Back in July up to 170 employees worked on 'The Daily'. This is a huge amount of people and even after a lay off round in August cutting 50 people off this means the production costs are very high. The initial costs for the publication are estimated at $30million! If you want to read more about the costs, Daring Fireball nailed it. Are you really wondering why this concept wouldn't work out finally?
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iPad-only: The publication is an iPad only application with no way to read the newspaper on a Android device or as web-magazine.
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Fixed layouts: The publication is a fixed layout. This is the same problem most common digital publishing solutions have for now. Instead of making a responsive and adaptive layout that automatically adapts to the different screen-sizes you have to publish a version for each single screen-size. It is easy to say that this is much more effort each day than not caring about single sizes.
Long story, short conclusion: Start smart (small team), serve everywhere, be responsive!