Media giant News Corp unveilled The Daily on Wednesday, the first news app of its kind for sale exclusively on the iPad.

For 99 cents a week or $40 a year, iPad users can subscribe to The Daily online publication that Rupert Murdoch hopes can help make "the business of news-gathering viable again" in the digital age.

“New times demand new journalism,” Murdoch said in a press release Wednesday.

“So we built The Daily completely from scratch -- on the most innovative device to come about in my time -- the iPad."

The News Corp owner was joined by Eddie Cue, Apple’s vice-president of applications and Internet services, at a press event at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

The app is a completely new upstart, costing News Corp $35 million to start up and will also cost half a million on a weekly basis, the Globe and Mail reported Wednesday.

The newspaper is also the first new daily news publication to be introduced in the United States since USA Today debuted 30 years ago.

“It sounds like they’re taking a unique and ground up approach to what is required to build a tablet based national newspaper that doesn’t have that footing in the real world,” Tom Vassos, a UofT social media professor, told thedailyplanet.com.

"The cost isn't huge, it's down to eleven cents a day," said Vassos, who is also a social business and mobility expert with IBM Canada. "But the big question is, will enough people pay to justify the costs of running it?”

How will it fare?

The Daily joins existing publications already established in the app world.

Apps for major newspapers and magazines have been rolling out since the tablet’s introduction last year.

The question now is how will The Daily fare since it faces tough competition from already popular iPad applications.

“You’re competing with Angry Birds, at some level," Jon Miller, Newscorp's chief digital officer, told the Globe and Mail.

To some degree, subscriptions to The Daily could be competing with other News Corp publications but Vassos said “the real thought from a marketing sector is you have to cannibalize your own sales before other publications do.”

Roughly 30 per cent of the revenue from all apps goes to Apple, and since it won't allow app creaters to download information about their users, advertisers won't have the lure of specific demographics that are so viable in today's digital marketing landscape.

Valuable advertising information

The ability to personalize what news you want to receive in apps -- such as certain stocks, weather, and sports score -- is one of the “carrots” Vassos said could entice users. At the same time, he said users will be giving valuable information to potential advertisers.

"They're probably reaching a different market segment because now you have to be an iPad owner,” said Vassos

The new app is currently a U.S. edition and only available in that country.

But, since Canadians are “avid users of these technologies”, they will have no problem catching on or catching up once it's available here, Vassos said.

With Apple finally hitting the 10 billionth download, Vassos said that this “proves that consumers are demanding information and applications on their terms - anywhere, any time."

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