Social sharing on The Daily dropping fast
The Nieman Journalism Lab reports that social sharing from iPad news app The Daily is falling precipitously, according to data from a firm called PostRank. Social sharing is when users share content on networks like Twitter or Facebook; the average number of pieces shared from The Daily on Twitter has fallen from over 200 to under 50 in just the past few months since its launch.
There's two sides to this. First, these are obviously not actual readership numbers, and just because readers aren't sharing many articles doesn't mean they're not being read. It's also important to remember that The Daily subscriptions run weekly or yearly, so a certain amount of its readers have already paid for a year of content.
However, given that this is one metric of engagement with the fledgling virtual publication, it's probably not a good sign. As Nieman's Joshua Benton says, this follows anecdotal evidence we've heard that the app has been declining despite an early spike in interest. If subscriptions and downloads correlate with these social sharing numbers, The Daily may be in trouble already.
[via BetaBeat]
