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News Corp's dedicated iPad newspaper, The Daily is set to be free to subscribers for a few more weeks following problems.
The Daily launched on 2 February and marked yet another Murdoch publication on the market, with a 2 week free trial sponsored by Verizon to get readers hooked.
However technical glitches marred the first week of launch, probably stopping some users from getting the full picture of the fledgling digital news offering and the free trial period was extended. But now there is news that the trial period has been further prolonged by at least a few weeks, paidContent reported.
The publisher of The Daily, Greg Clayman told paidContent that when the free trial will end has not been decided and Verizon will continue to back the publication, but a decision may be reached this week.
Apparently after the initial free period, new downloads will still come with 14 days free before a subscription is needed. The ‘newspaper' will cost 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year.
Despite the technical difficulties, including a very slow load time, The Daily reportedly started to sell subscriptions as soon as it went live and although Clayman has not reportedly revealed just how many subscriptions sold on the day of launch or since then, or in fact how many times The Daily app has been downloaded, he apparently claimed that the response has ‘exceeded expectations'.
Clayman apparently admitted that ‘stability issues' caused the initial hiccups.
"Basically a lot of usage that we hadn't seen, a lot of people that were using it. We want to continue buffing it. I think everyone should. The best part of the interaction with our readers is going back and forth, getting a lot of feedback. We want to keep making it better," he told the website.
Clayman was apparently vague about the reasons for The Daily's late launch. It was pushed back by around 2 weeks and he suggested it was due to a problem with the subscriptions in iTunes.
"The extra time that we had to build it was very important. We were the first subscription service and that took a minute to get right with Apple," he reportedly added.
Apparently plans are underway to bring the publication to Android in the latter stages of Q2.
