Another WordPress News Site Bites the Dust

WP Daily has just announced that it’s closing up shop and going away.

In fact, it’s already closed up shop. When you go to the home page, you get the following:

Clicking on the questions link at the bottom takes you to a message that doesn’t really give many details.  The quotation below is as specific as they get.

We achieved every single goal and metric that we had set out to accomplish (and then some) in this glorious experiment and so we consider it a “success.” But, it did not achieve the much larger global goals and strategy of our organization at this present time.

Consequently, we’ve pulled the plug.

There’s been a lot of talk about WordPress news sites lately – essentially about how most of them seem to fail. (For the record, it’s not really fair to say that WP Daily “failed.”  We don’t really know all the details.)

Of course we’ve had our part in these conversations, talking about the demise of the WordPress Planet,  an attempt to make a new WordPress Planet, and whether WordPress news sites are worth paying for.

This latest news from WP Daily (which seemed to have many fans) only serves to reinforce the hard realities making a WordPress news site work. And so once again it raises the questions: What’s the solution? What models can work?

WPMU.org’s model obviously works. We’re backed by the revenue from WPMU DEV.

But is there another model?  … Any ideas? … And what’s the REAL reason WP Daily closed up shop?