The Daily’s readership figures are less than a quarter of what they need to be to break even, Publicis Groupe executive VP John Nitti revealed in a discussion Wednesday. Relaying what it had heard directly from News Corp., the advertiser told Bloomberg that about 120,000 unique readers, which could include those on two-week trials, were being tracked every week. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch had said during the launch event that about 500,000 were needed to break even.
Murdoch had expected that the currently iPad-focused publication would take some time to get up to sustainable numbers but hadn’t said when or if there were certain milestones to gauge whether it was doing well. Although The Daily was promised for other platforms shortly after it started, it only just left the iPad this month, when Facebook rolled out an expanded Open Graph and let The Daily bring in an optimized app.
