iPad Only Daily from Rupert Murdoch: Will it be Successful?

We came to know recently that Mr. Rupert Murdoch was keen to publish an iPad based newspaper called Daily. This is going to be a new style of publishing and we are excited to see how it goes. However, not everyone is very hopeful about its future potential. I just finished reading an opinion article by Emily Bell at the Guardian website titled: Rupert Murdoch's iPad experiment is unlikely to succeed

The title indicates everything and it is clear that Miss Bell is not hopeful at all about the success of the Daily. You should read the whole article to understand what her argument is. I partly agree with her but at the same time I have to say that he could not clearly state her reasons.

From the article, I came to know that Mr. Murdoch has most probably invested nearly $30 million for the venture. It is quite a lot of money and if the rumors are true then nearly 100 journalists are working on it. You can easily understand that it will take a lot of money to give regular salary to these 100 workers. Some of the workers are famous names in the journalism industry and naturally their salary will be high.

The market of iPad is growing and in the next one year, a lot of iPads will be sold. So, Rupert Murdoch will already have a large potential customer base but the main challenge is whether many people will pay near 99 cents a week to read this newspaper in their iPads.

When people will pay money to read a newspaper in the iPad then naturally they will expect that the advertisements will be minimum. So, it will be a real challenge for Mr Murdoch to make it a profitable venture.

I agree with this kind of argument of Miss Bell. However, if the newspaper is read in other tablet devices like Samsung Galaxy Tab in the user based can increase significantly in one or two years. Secondly, when you start a business you don’t expect that it will go profitable within a year. So, if Rupert Murdoch can get millions of readers then even by giving some loss then it will be a huge market for the advertisers.

Naturally, Mr. Murdoch will have to face immense competition in this market. Miss Bell stated that on December 9 2010 (the same day the launching ceremony of the Daily is supposed to take place) an American publisher will come up with a similar kind of partnership with Google. If it really happens then naturally Mr. Murdoch will have to face competition because we can expect that the venture of Google will be free to do the readers.