The Failure of Magazine Apps

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/the-dakly-died-of-suckage/

I remember the first time I saw the news right around the time when the first iPad launched about how Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch had struck a deal to bring the news medium to the online tablet space with the launch of The Daily.  Today's results show that the initiative has clearly failed, and one of the major reasons seems to have come from copying over hundreds of megabytes worth of data with no creativity or imagination ported into the way content is viewed by end-users.  Taking magazine apps for example, page by page content is exactly the same as the paper version of the magazine.

I truly believe publishers could have done a much better job of creating interactive online content that would have changed the interface consumers use for viewing content.  It also could have been a great opportunity for publishers to collect more revenue through digital advertisements.  A thoughtful business model would have allowed publishers to earn advertisement revenue through normal magazine advertising channels and interactive online downloadable content.  It's not too late to win in this game, and hopefully some magazines and newspapers will get it right.