Buried in a lengthy press release about News Corp’s long-proposed business separation, the company unceremoniously announced the end of The Daily, its experimental iPad-only news app.

Production of the Daily’s iPad app will cease on December 15, 2012, though News Corp says its brand will “live on” in other properties. Additionally, News Corp’s experience with The Daily won’t go to waste — the company says technology and “other assets,” including some staff, from the app will move to the New York Post. The Daily publisher Greg Clayman will lead News Corp’s digital strategy.

The news isn’t a huge surprise since The Daily cut 30 percent of its staff in July. The Daily launched in February 2011 and reportedly cost News Corp about $30 million a year. It eventually made its way to a few Verizon Android tablets, as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The plan was to break even after five years — but it appears The Daily’s slow growth made that plan unsustainable.

As the first all-iPad magazine, The Daily also saw some initial support from Apple. Eddy Cue, vice president of interactive services at Apple, joined Murdoch on stage to launch the app. But even from the beginning, it seemed like a big production for a fairly limited market. After testing it out for a few weeks, I let my Daily subscription lapse and never gave it a second thought.

“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said in a statement today. “Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties.”

News Corp announced back in June that it would split into two separate publicly traded companies. Today the company revealed that its future publishing arm will retain the name News Corp, while the entertainment arm will be called Fox Group. Murdoch will continue to serve as chairman of News Corp, but will be handing the chief executive role to Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch will serve as chairman and CEO for Fox Group.

Cameron Yuill, chief executive of AdGent Digital, says the failure of The Daily came down to a simple math problem:

Not enough subscribers to cover the cost of production and distribution (Apple’s 30% fee). The Daily had reportedly 100,000 subscribers at $40 per year which by my math is only $4 million annually. The mistake News Corp. made was hiring (expensive) editorial, journalists and technologists to build and provide content for the newspaper. No doubt overhead was way in excess of income. Murdoch has made the decision that The Daily is not growing fast enough to ever have a chance of covering its costs, let alone making a profit. So The Daily bites the dust. Fair enough.

“We learned that no one is happy with the current state of Digg.”

Those are the words of Betaworks’ Jake Levine, now Digg’s general manager, on the conclusive feedback of thousands of people who responded to a survey on how to improve Digg.

Betaworks acquired what was left of decaying social news site Digg two weeks ago. The New York-based startup-building machine has since teased its ambitious goal to remake Digg from the inside out and announced plans to release version one on August 1. Friday, the group also called upon the Internet to help it “Rethink Digg.”

Rethink Digg they must, as 92 percent of people surveyed said they would not recommend the current version of Digg to a friend.

“This level of dissatisfaction does not call for incremental improvement,” Levine said. “The problem we are trying to solve with v1 — how can we deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now? — calls for something else.”

The new Digg won’t just be an evolution of the current Digg, a Reddit clone, or a Hacker News ripoff, Levine said, without shedding any additional light on what version one will look like. We do know, based on a few hints, that the Digg experience will center around news discovery, have mobile as a part of its DNA, and take some inspiration from News.me, the social news applications for iOS also built by Betaworks.

But let’s call a spade a spade. Today’s obvious revelation by Digg’s new owners about the current state of the service’s disrepair and the promise of something very different is just foreplay, playful teasing meant to keep us all on the edge in anticipation for what’s to come. Let’s hope we get a big payoff come August 1.

Photo credit: Louish Pixel/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

UPDATE 3/21/2012: We’ve updated this story with the correct name of Localytics.

As our culture shifts from a desktop-based paradigm to a mobile one, news junkies are leading the trend with their consumption habits.

New data from app analytics firm Localytics show that news readers are more engaged on mobile apps than on websites and that they are more likely to return to a news app than to a news site.

Data from Nielsen showed that around 70 percent of casual news readers went to a given news site one or two times each month, and less than 10 percent of readers would visit a news site 10 or more times in a month.

By contrast, Localytics found that 29 percent of news readers will use a mobile news app at least once a month — a much smaller figure than the 70 percent of mainstream web-based news readers. However, Localytics also found that 24 percent of news readers would launch that news app more than 10 times in a month.

These news hounds who download and keep returning to their mobile news apps aren’t the casual readers Nielsen is tracking. Rather, they’re fans of a news brand (for example, the New York Times or Washington Post), and they use the apps for news discovery very much in the same way they would do if they had a physical newspaper subscription.

And for news publications, this means a whole new set of goals for use and engagement on digital properties, Localytics points out. Rather than pure traffic, the firm’s blog says, publications should be shooting for high session times, a large number of articles read, and lots of app relaunches on each mobile device.

Image courtesy of Goodluz, Shutterstock

The app aggregates news stories from RSS feeds and social networks and presents them in a design that was apparently impressive enough that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs showed it off on-stage last year. It started out as an iPad application created by two graduate students for a class at Stanford Institute for Design, but Pulse is now available for iPhone and Android as well — and the company recently launched a Web service for sending stories from your computer to the app.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company’s relationship with the media industry — specifically The New York Times — got off to a rocky start when The Times objected to the app last June, and it was temporarily removed from Apple’s App Store. Now, however, Pulse says it has content deals with companies that include The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, The Huffington Post, and The New Yorker. It also says it has more than 4 million users.

The new funding comes New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures. Pulse previously raised a seed round of less than $1 million from Redpoint Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, and SV Angel.