The Daily, News Corp’s subscription iPad news publication, is about to turn one year old. To celebrate, it announced yesterday that it will be pre-installed on select Verizon Android tablets, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 will be among the next Android tablets to get the app. Existing Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners will get The Daily bundled in a software update this month.
Verizon users get a free trial for one week. A monthly subscription costs $3.99, and an annual subscription costs $39.99. Publisher Greg Clayman told paidContent that The Daily currently has 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad. It needs 500,000 to break even.
News Corp has put its weight behind The Daily. It hired a large, accomplished team, and chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch reportedly invested $30 million personally. Murdoch says The Daily’s costs are about “half a million dollars a week.”
Though paid subscriptions have grown about 25% since it last reported numbers in October, that’s a steep hill to climb. Staci Kramer at paidContent wrote in October that “[t]he shelf life of other News Corp. digital experiments suggests the Daily isn’t likely to survive… unless it shows real signs it can get in the black.”
David Brinker, The Daily’s senior VP of business development and operations, wondered aloud to The Wrap yesterday whether it should have launched on February 2 of this year instead. Was The Daily ahead of its time? Brinker gave his publication a wide berth, saying the market could take three years to develop.
Meanwhile, since the launch of Apple’s iOS 5 and Newsstand feature, The Daily has some competition for its vision of the future of newspapers. Expanding to Android devices gives The Daily a chance to diversify. Android tablets have begun to chip away at the iPad’s dominance, occupying about 20% of the market.
News Corp has had some issues with digital media lately. After Murdoch joined Twitter, the company verified an impostor account pretending to be his wife.
How do you read your digital news?
