A while back, I wrote about The Daily and old subscription model that the App uses would ultimately be its downfall. Well, it looks like number of tweets emanating from the App is dwindling since its launch. This can’t be a good sign.

To refresh your memory, The Daily is an iPad only interactive Magazine App that is subscription based. The content is available only through the App, though users can share it via social media. However, the shared content is not interactive, but just a static image. This is piss poor compared to the experience from the App. I’ve played with The Daily on a friend’s iPad (since they give out a free trial period for it), and though cool, I honestly couldn’t ever see myself subscribing.

The amount of Twitter posts sent through the App has been dwindling. While this is not indicative of readership, it does show that users are no longer willing to share content in such a crappy way. This is alarming since the daily numbers of The Daily tweets dropped from about 200 a day in mid February to only about 50 a day in March, though, the numbers have not dropped much more since.

Be this an effect of the two week trial period (hundreds of thousands have downloaded the app, but I suspect few have subscribed), or people just getting tired of a daily magazine, I don’t see much life left in The Daily. I predict that it will be shut down by the end of next year, if not this one.

Free (both in beer and speech) press is the future of news and opinions. I keep on saying over and over again, like a broken record, that paid-subscription, unless there is a tangible product, is dead. Pay walls and content walls discourage potential readers from accessing content.