Can 'The Daily' ever make money

News Corp's Ipad newspaper 'The Daily' launched this week in New York http://www.thedaily.com/. The digital newspaper has cost $30m to get to launch and will cost $500k per week to run.

Subscriptions will be $0.99 per week or $39.99 per year.

Whether the content is good or not is being debated widely on blogs and in news articles, so I want to focus on whether it can make money from it's cover price alone. Of course, if the newspaper gains enough subscribers it can attract advertising money, but in its growth period, it will be reliant on subscription revenues.

To cover the running costs for a year ($25m) it will need to gain over 600k annual subscriptions, and that is before it has paid for the investment ($30m). The Times paywall in the UK has only attracted 50k+ subscribers after many months of marketing.

digital books sales may 'overtake' print sales by 2014

As reading moves to eReaders and book sales move on-line, publishers and retailers will struggle in this new world

• 10.5m people in the US now own a dedicated e-reader
• 10m iPads sold in the US in 2010
• $1b was spent on eBooks in 2010
• half of book sales in 2014 will be digital

More details from the Bookseller

On-line Video Views pass 6 billion/month

UK viewers watched more than six billion online content videos and 527 million online video ads in November last year, according to ComScore figures

Full release here

Google (mostly via YouTube) ranked highesr for viewing viewing sessions, attracting 34.4 m people watching 2.8 billion videos.

ITV served the most on-line video ads:

Book publishing finally goes digital ready for 2011

There are a number of interesting news articles coming out about the rise of eBooks and how digital media is being used by book publishers to innovate and diversify.

The bookseller published an article in September 2010 that started to suggest that e-book sales are beginning to cannibalise printed books, especially in the genre of romance and science fiction.

The Times published a story on 1st January 2011 analysing the growth of romance e-books. According to Nielsen BookScan data, in 2009, 2% of all traditional books sold were in the 'romance and sagas' category, compared with 14% f all e-books sold in 2009.

In the last week of December, Amazon said its Kindle machine was the best selling product in the retail website's history. Amazon is believed to have sold 8m in 2010, up from 2.4m in 2009. There have been 14m sales on iPads since it launched in early 2010.

US bookseller Barnes & Noble said digital books were outselling physical ones of it website, with the retailer selling nearly 1 million e-books on Christmas Day alone.

According to the Bookseller, Random House Groups Uk's e-book sales increased 800% year-on-year in 2010. Random House also launched an innovative new book 'Mortal Kiss' with teen website Stardoll. In the US, the group believes they could achieve 10% of sales via eBooks in 2011.

And finally Daniel Winner's blog analyses the market after attending a recent conference. He is taken with Pearson's diversification in to its on-line world 'Poptropica' and predicts a rich future for digital book publishing if the industry embraces the opportunity.

Also, keep an eye on The Bookseller's website http://www.thebookseller.com/.

Yahoo! extends its crowd sourcing of content to match AOL

Yahoo!has created the Yahoo! Contributor Network a platform for user contributed content. This is in addition to its recent purchase of Associated Content earlier in 2010.

AOL already has a similar platform called 'AOL SEED network'.

Check out the Wall Blog for more analysis.

News International unveils first paywall figures

Brand Republic's story on News International's paywall figures:

"News International has revealed for the first time that it has had over 200,000 people pay for its digital edition of The Times and Sunday Times since putting up a paywall in July.

Half of those have paid for a joint print/digital subscription, which could include "some duplication" while around 105,000 have paid for digital-only packages."

can be interpreted in two ways:

1) News International have successfully launched their paywall strategy and have added to their overall 'subscribers' to The Times/Sunday Times.

2) The low number of digital subscribers to the The Times/Sunday Times proves that the UK audience don't feel there is (yet) enough value behind the paywall to pay.

ITV launches Corrie Nation social game

Corrie Nation has now launched in to beta.

Start with the Rover's Return and start building 'The Street' by acquiring Corrie Gold through tasks & stocking the shops/houses with relevant virtual goods. Different virtual goods give off XP & Corrie Gold after a time period. Charicatures of the cast cast be added to the Street and they will give you tasks to perform which can yield yet more Corrie Gold.

The game is still a little buggy, but is a good move in to driving a new revenue stream from ITV.com. Give it a go and start building The Street level by level.

Play it here:http://apps.facebook.com/corrienation/