July 31, 2012: The world’s first iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, lays off almost one third of its staff, firing 50 of its 170 employees.

The cuts affect mainly sports and editorial page staff, although it also includes production and design employees. It comes as the iPad app journal is placed “on watch” due to its disappointing adoption.

An innovative idea…

When the iPad first burst onto the scene in early 2010, the tech-loving world was desperate to get hold of one. It was also trying to figure out what the iPad would be most useful for.

One obvious use-case was as a news reader. Ahead of the iPad’s launch, Steve Jobs met with executives from both the The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in an effort to get the news organizations on board for app development.

The Daily was an effort to go one step further. Rather than simply reconfiguring existing media giants for the iPad age, The Daily was News Corp’s efforts to create a newspaper exclusively for Apple’s new tablet (although it later added support for both the Galaxy Tab and Facebook.)

On paper, it was a great idea. The publishing industry had been suffering for years as the internet changed the way that news was disseminated. However, iTunes and the App Store’s success had opened up a new distribution model, which proved that customers were willing to pay for content so long as it was high quality and easy to access.

From a reader perspective, it was also enticing: offering a mixture of traditional news layout with interactive elements, as well as localized information such as weather forecasts.

The Daily was funded by Rupert Murdoch to the tune of $30 million, with a budget of $500,000 per week. Subscriptions cost $0.99 per week, of which News Corp. received $0.70, along with any advertising it could sell. At the time, The Daily was the first app allowed to offer recurring, rather than one-off, payments.

This preferential treatment may have been because of Steve Jobs’ personal interest in the newspaper, which saw him make numerous visits to the paper’s office in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

…with major flaws

Unfortunately, The Daily didn’t work out as well as planned. Despite picking up more than 100,000 paying subscriptions, it lost around $30 million in its first year. Writing about it at the time of its February 2011 launch, Tidbits writer Adam C. Engs noted that the paper would need to hit roughly 715,000 paid subscribers simply to break even. It never came close.

The problem wasn’t just limited to pricing, however. As a newspaper, it lacked editorial focus and failed to offer an experience that was sufficiently different to that which was already available for free elsewhere. Stories were also not linkable due to appearing only in-app. This made it hard for news to be shared and for organic growth to occur. Finally, issues were frequently large in file size. Issues could be up to 1 gigabyte in size, which took 10-15 minutes to download for many users.

Ultimately, the experiment didn’t make it to the end of 2012. On December 3, News Corporation announced that the world’s first iPad newspaper would cease operations as part of a reorganization of company assets. According to Murdoch, the The Daily, “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.”

Not the cure-all that was hoped for

The news industry has continued to struggle in the years since, with the iPad not proving to be the magic cure-all the traditional media industry had hoped for. While The Daily was a prominent example of this, other magazine apps failed to catch on quite as well as hoped.

Apple launched its Apple News aggregation app with iOS 9 in 2015, but despite minor successes it has largely been a disappointment.

Were you a subscriber to The Daily? Leave your comments below.