HuffPo, The Daily and the flawed iPad content model

GigaOm reporting:
A little over a month ago, The Huffington Post launched an ambitious project with much fanfare: a weekly magazine app for the iPad called Huffington, which users could download for 99 cents an issue or $19.99 for a year’s worth. The demand for this new format seems to have been underwhelming, however, since the new-media giant says it is dropping the fee and will make the app free of charge to download. Meanwhile, another media giant — News Corp. — has laid off dozens of staff at its iPad newspaper The Daily, and there continue to be rumors that the entire operation could be in jeopardy. Are these two isolated cases, or a sign that cracks are starting to show in the content model that publishers have bought into with the iPad?...
Dedicated apps don’t fit the way content works any more
Whether media companies like it or not (and they mostly don’t), much of the news and other content we consume now comes via links shared through Twitter and Facebook and other networks, or through old-fashioned aggregators — such as Yahoo News or Google News — and newer ones like Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic that are tailored to mobile devices and a socially-driven news experience. Compared to that kind of model, a dedicated app from a magazine or a newspaper looks much less interesting, since by design it contains content from only a single outlet, and it usually doesn’t contain helpful things like links.
The Daily suffers from this problem and plenty of others, in my view. Not only is it content from a single entity, but it doesn’t even offer a website where readers can find or easily share that content — and while that may have looked to some observers like an ambitious bet on a mobile-only model when the paper launched, for many readers I expect it is merely a hassle
... The fact that The Daily has only managed to sell 100,000 or so subscriptions in the 18 months since it launched (compared with the 500,000 that News Corp. said it would need to break even on the publication) certainly doesn’t bode well for the future.
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/02/huffpo-the-daily-and-the-flawed-ipad-content-model/