DailyCandy was once a hip newsletter that kept subscribers in touch with the latest, coolest entertainment, food and fashion trends. And then Comcast ran it into the ground.
Founder Dany Levy didn’t mince words about her frustration with Comcast’s mismanagement of DailyCandy in a video interview with Inc. about the demise of her former company.
“From my perspective, I watched them destroy a brand,” Levy said.
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She explained that the deal with Comcast on Sept. 12, 2008, had an ominous start.
“Lehman Brothers went under that weekend and the market crashed. If we had waited a day longer, the deal would have never happened,” she said. “We started out on sort of awkward footing because I think Comcast felt like they were sold a false bill of goods because we had done these projects without knowing — because no one knew — the market was going to crash, so Comcast was like ‘WTF? These numbers are not going to happen.’”
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Levy believes Comcast botched DailyCandy’s once popular format by copying other companies’ revenue strategies, like Groupon, which turned off a lot of users and, in essence, turned DailyCandy into a spam email subscription.
“It became a desperate clamoring to find something that was going to make money, and you were getting potentially eight emails a day,” she said. “To be frank with you, I unsubscribed, I couldn’t watch it. It was like watching a train wreck.”