A Turd By Any Other Name…
…would smell like shit.
This evening, Brian Alvey, chief scientist and founder of Ceros, wrote a rebuttal to my post from last week about the death of The Daily. While Alvey wrote his post on TechCrunch as well, I figured two back-and-forths was enough of a circle jerk for TC, so I’ll respond here.
Avley seems particularly annoyed with my post because he and his team helped build The Daily.
And it’s great, you see. No, there’s no tangible proof that it is or was ever great. But he says they put a lot of work into it. Puppy dogs, milkshakes, and rainbows. Effort medals all around.
In reality, The Daily was still shit. I’m sorry, it just was. Alvey implies that I was never a reader — but I was. I happily subscribed to The Daily from its inception until I had to pay for it. At that point, I made the (right) call, that it simply wasn’t worth it — for many of the reasons outlined in my initial post. Clearly, millions of folks agreed.
I did try it about a year later and still found it to be slow and unreliable — not worthy of my money or my time.
Alvey’s main point seems to be that I’m misguided because each issue of The Daily was smaller than 50MB. 50MB! Awesome. It’s a fucking daily. Clearly, I was bitching about monthly magazines that were 500MB to 700MB.
Math: If The Daily clocked in at (conservatively) 30MB a day, that’s 900MB to 1GB a month.
Repeat after me: Turdage.
Look, here’s what really matters: was The Daily a good product?
No.
Yes, it sucked on the iPad 1 and it got marginally better on the subsequent faster iPads. But it was never a great product that provided a wonderful experience. If you fail to hit that simple benchmark, you failed. Case closed.
You can sugar-coat your shit, but it’s still shit. Be a man, own up to it, learn from your mistakes, and improve. I don’t really see the point in writing a post filled with excuses for The Daily. At the end of the day, the market decided.
Again, there will be winners in this space. And the only thing I’m certain of is that those winners won’t look or act anything like The Daily.