DAG (2007 - 2008)

2007 - 2008

dead europe

a telephone company and a newspaper publisher started a free daily together in may 2007, on the theory that a printed page could hand you off to a website and a phone screen. dutch commuters took 400,000 copies a day at the peak, which sounds like success until you look at what advertisers were willing to pay for a reader who had not chosen to read. kpn walked away from the content side after about six months and the paper was rebuilt from scratch inside its first year. pcm printed the last one on 1 october 2008, at least twenty million euros down, then kept the website breathing for exactly one more year before switching that off too.

» see dag.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DAG only made sense if you were standing on a Dutch railway platform at eight in the morning (cant remember the exact year). The free daily was a commuter format, printed for people held still between a turnstile and a seat (close enough). it was funded entirely by the fact that they had nothing else to look at for nineteen minutes. for some reason. That is a distribution model before it is a newspaper.

It launched on 8 May '07, owned jointly by KPN, the Dutch telephone incumbent. pCM Uitgevers, which published de Volkskrant and most of the serious press in the country. back then. The idea was cross-media, and in '07 that word still had money behind it. anyway. The paper would be short and the website would be long. You would read a headline in the tabloid. finish the story on dag.nl or on your phone. more or less. kPN would supply the pipe.

i just was not paying attention by then, but anyway (dont quote me on that). Circulation moved fast. 325,000 copies by June, 400,000 a day by September once a Saturday edition was added, handed out at stations and pushed into supermarkets. On paper that is a national newspaper. in those days. In practice DAG had walked into the middle of the Dutch free-paper war. Metro and Sp!ts had been giving copies away since '99 (give or take). de Pers launched the same spring DAG did, which left four titles competing for one commuter and one advertiser.

The Turkish newspaper i grew up next to was one you bought. either way. The free press i saw was promotional, something attached to a purchase or a campaign rather than a standalone daily with an editorial staff.

for whatever reason. the commuter rhythm that makes this format work was not there either. A paper handed to you at a barrier is a Northern European object. dAG is what happens when the object gets built by people who own the barrier.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	8 may 2007, a tabloid handed out at Dutch stations and supermarkets
Peak	400,000 copies a day in september 2007
Killed	1 october 2008, the final printed issue
Lifespan	seventeen months in print, twenty nine online
Made by	PCM Uitgevers with KPN
Killed by	an advertising market that would not pay for readers who had not chosen to read

~ how it landed ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly, badly, and quickly. to be honest. Within six months KPN had withdrawn from the content side, which left PCM running a newspaper it had partly designed around a partner that was no longer there. The multimedia half never behaved as promised, because a reader who is given a free paper is not a reader looking for more of it on a screen (close enough). Bob Witman was editor in chief (cant remember the exact year).

this part you had to be in the US for, and i actually was not. So they rebuilt it inside its first year. More Volkskrant copy went in, the photography was cut back, the design changed and the multimedia emphasis was quietly dropped (give or take). What emerged was a shorter free version of a paper PCM already published, which is a rational response to a failing product and also an admission that the original idea had been the whole reason for making it (if memory serves).

~ how it actually ended ~

this part i was not really around for, but anyway. The end came on 29 September 2008 with the announcement. on 1 October with the last printed issue. Timing was part of it. The autumn of 2008 was not a season in which anybody was funding an experimental advertising-supported daily. the Dutch free-paper market consolidated hard over the following years until Metro was the only one still standing (roughly).

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. in those days. The website outlived the paper by exactly a year and stopped on 1 October 2009. The archive stayed reachable a while longer, then went too, on 23 June '10. for some reason. Three shutdown dates for one newspaper, each one quieter than the last.

~ what came after ~

this is mostly told from the outside. There was a second, uglier number circling the same story: PCM had negotiated in 2006 with the investor Marcel Boekhoorn about a free paper and then declined to work with him, after which he launched De Pers on his own and a damages claim of roughly ninety six million euros was raised against the publisher. PCM lost at least twenty million euros on it. DAG cost the company money twice, once by existing and once by the way it came to exist.

The lesson everybody drew was about free newspapers, and it was the wrong lesson. What DAG actually tested was whether print could be used as a funnel into a website. anyway, the answer turned out to be no, not because readers cannot follow a link but because a reader who paid nothing owes you nothing. Every publisher that later tried to convert a free audience into a digital one ran the same experiment on a bigger budget and got the same result.

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