Decline, plateau, decline: New data on The Daily

From NiemanLab
While the news industry looks at smartphone and tablet apps as a chance to build more engaged readers — and maybe even get people to pay! — for those of us who watch the business, apps are frustratingly opaque.
With sites on the open web, there are any number of ways for outsiders to estimate the size of audience a news outlet is reaching. They’re imperfect, but they’re out there. But for, say, apps sold in Apple’s App Store, the only data available is pretty poor. For top sellers, you can see where they rank among other free or paid apps, but those numbers flit around from day to day. The number of ratings or reviews tell you something, but not a lot.
...No one outside News Corp. and Apple has a reliable way of knowing how often people read The Daily. But there is one way in which The Daily’s app interacts with the public web — through Twitter sharing. On nearly every page in the app, there’s a sharing button in the top right that allows the reader to share a link to the story on Twitter or other social networks. (A few pages, like the table of contents and user-customized pages, aren’t sharable.)
..,The data doesn’t look good for The Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.
The data doesn’t look good for The Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.

MH To see the charts go to
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/decline-plateau-decline-new-data-on-the-daily-suggests-a-social-media-decline-and-a-tough-road-ahead