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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
I'd wait until The Magazine and other "new media" forms you've mentioned have lasted even as long as The Daily did before proclaiming them as success: format issues aside, there is a fundamental difficulty inherent in getting people to pay for magazine-style pubs at all.
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I don't really have any worries there because The Magazine is already profitable a month after its launch. That's crazy. I have worked in startups and most take 2-3 years to earn their first dollar.
The Daily didn't have any problem finding subscribers; it quickly signed up more than 100,000 readers who were willing to pay $40 a year. Its problem was that it had a $30 million operating budget and $5 million in yearly revenues. It never would have lasted two weeks, much less two years, if it hadn't been financed by Rupert Murdoch's other businesses.
I think it just fundamentally misunderstood the medium. It tried to create something on the scale of a massive print newspaper with a relatively tiny subscriber base (compare to the WSJ's 2.1M or the NYT's 1.5M). It didn't offer anything that other newspapers weren't already producing; no one ever sent me an editorial from The Daily saying, "you have to read this!!" It didn't try to create content that would specifically appeal to the kind of people who own iPads. It was a pain in the ass to download and use.
I dunno. You're right that it's way too early to declare any kind of definitive sea change in publishing, but I think the future is bright for this trend.