Every year, companies gather in New York to pitch advertisers on their latest and greatest digital offerings in digital media’s response to television upfronts.
Here are some of the highlights from this year’s NewFronts which occurred between April 27 and May 7…
Mobile-first, or web-first? Neither alone is a real strategy for success.
For Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., learning that has proved to be an expensive experience as the media giant has decided to abandon its iPad-only publication, The Daily, after less than two years.
With Facebook going public and expecting to receive a valuation of up to $100bn when its shares hit the market, it’s easy to forget that just a handful of years ago, Facebook wasn’t the only game in town in the social networking space.
And for a time, there was actually another leader: MySpace.
Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced that it was making a significant bet on tablet devices.
The bet: that an iPad-only news publication could launch and thrive at a time when many established news publications were struggling to survive.
“New times demand new journalism,” Murdoch proclaimed. And with eight figures in investment in The Daily, he stated confidently, “we believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed in this digital age”.
Half a year later, however, The Daily appears to be off to a slower start than Murdoch may have anticipated.
Most major media companies have accepted that digital is here to stay, and many are embracing digital, recognizing that it could some day soon be their most important channel.
But that doesn’t mean that they have stopped making poor digital decisions.
Yesterday, News Corp. made what many publishing executives hope will be
one of the most important announcements in the annals of digital
publishing: the launch of the much-anticipated iPad publication, The
Daily.
But while subscribing to The Daily is probably accurately described as ‘affordable‘ at 99 cents a week, or $39.99/year, producing the publication isn’t. News Corp. has confirmed that its investment to date is already a whopping $30m, and that The Daily will have a weekly overhead of $500,000.