It’s been a torrid year for the Murdoch family and
Rupert in particular. The media mogul was ‘humbled,’ during hacking gate,
closed his only newspaper which
actually made any money and was even accosted with a custard pie. You’d
forgive him for thinking that things couldn’t get much worse, but, as they say
in old blighty, ‘when it rains, it pours.’
It would seem that Murdoch’s venture into the digital world
has not provided the ray of sunshine he hoped it would be and I’m not talking
about paywalls. The tablet newspaper ‘The Daily,’ launched in February, is
averaging a rather pitiful 120,000 readers a week. Bearing in mind that
when the paper was launched in February it was declared that it would need an
average weekly readership of 500,000 to break even, it’s safe to say that so
far it has not been a success.
Why? It would appear that once again News International
is falling foul of what is fast becoming a cast iron law of digital
communication that, if it is on the web, then ‘Generation Won’t Pay’ wants it
for free. No matter how insignificant 99 cents a week is, against a
plethora of quality and more importantly free content online, we just won’t
reach into our pockets.
It is hard to over-emphasise how much of a blow this is for
Murdoch. The tablet was seen as a way of extracting revenue from a bust
financial model, namely print media. Now it would appear that it is back
to the drawing board unless of course he makes the
Times / Sunday Times paywall actually work.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for any subscriber figures on
that though!
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