The One Lesson From The Thousand ‘Lessons Why The Daily Failed’ Articles

People care about this stuff. A lot. Enough to write articles about it. Like, a shitload of them.

The Daily didn’t work as a tablet publication, obviously, because of a mix of problems — it cost too much to produce, it wasn’t very good, News Corp. issues, etc. But something will work. I’ve heard great things, for example, about TRVL, an iPad travel magazine. And I love the new trend of bloggy Newsstand apps, which NYC’s 29th Street Publishing is working hard on.

Anyway, John Gruber sums up The Daily‘s case well:

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.

At very least, they bet big on something new. You can’t say that about the vast majority of media companies.