The Daily, the iPad-only magazine built by News Corp. with help from Apple when the two companies unveiled iTunes app subscriptions in February, is about to hit 1 million App Store downloads, TechCrunch reports. At the TechCrunch Disrupt panel entitled “Disrupting Publishing from Tablets to Links”, The Daily publisher Greg Clayman said the app is nearing the important milestone of 1 million downloads, though he didn’t provide any details on the number of people that decided to subscribe to the app since late March, when The Daily started charging for content after an initial free run sponsored by Verizon Wireless. The Daily currently comes with in-app subscriptions priced at $1 per week or $40 per year; a report from April suggested The Daily, both because of paywall and editorial choices, was seeing a decline in popularity in spite of Apple’s heavy promotion on Apple.com and the App Store homepage. Others suggested the same when News Corp. confirmed 800k downloads in 3 months and a $10 million loss over the last quarter to run The Daily operations.
However, 1 million downloads is a notable milestone that, in the words of Clayman, puts The Daily “in the large pantheon of large news apps.” Our first impressions of the app still hold true today – The Daily isn’t the fastest news app available on the App Store and not even the iPad 2’s beefier processor managed to make The Daily run smoothly without crashes of sorts. The Daily is expected to become available on more devices later this year, including the Android tablets that have been rolling out in the market in the past months.
