• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, December 3, 2012

Perhaps ahead of its time, The Daily is calling it quits after less than two years of operation. Where did News Corp.’s iPad-based newspaper go wrong?

“Our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term,” News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch explained in a press release.

“The app was initially hampered by technical problems, but the Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one,” according to AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka.

“Given the amount of free news available online, persuading people to subscribe to an iPad-only publication was always going to be a hard sell,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog (without a hint of irony).

“The Daily was, fundamentally, a bad idea from the start,” writes Gawker. “It chose to limit its audience mainly to iPad owners, eschewing the wider Internet … Its huge budget and lack of a cohesive news identity did not help matters.”

“The fact that [News Corp.] put all its eggs in the tablet basket with no Web-based edition was always going to limit its uptake,” The Next Web reasons.

More broadly, “The Daily's closure underscores the difficulties related to launching a fully realized news alternative to major, traditional publishers, even with the backing of a company like News Corp.,” CNet writes.

Indeed, “what the closure represents is a recognition that it is hard to launch a new news brand with an old model, even on a brand new, sexy device that is nevertheless still on a very attractive growth curve,” paidContent seconds.