Honestly I just misunderstood the intention to mean the people who were making the product, and reacted to that. No distortion was intended.
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New York Times' Print and Digital Units Reportedly Disagreeing Over iPad Content Pricing
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Honestly I just misunderstood the intention to mean the people who were making the product, and reacted to that. No distortion was intended.
Earth to NY Times Print Distribution Team
The year is 2010, NOT 1910.
The world is different and so should your thinking. Print and distribution costs are eliminated completely with electronic delivery and the cost of electronic delivery is tiny compared with last century publication costs.
Lower subscription pricing means more subscribers over time.
The year is 2010, NOT 1910.
The world is different and so should your thinking. Print and distribution costs are eliminated completely with electronic delivery and the cost of electronic delivery is tiny compared with last century publication costs.
Lower subscription pricing means more subscribers over time.
And your right but where those (print and distribution) costs are eliminated new costs rise. IE Development, interactive, video (no video with paper) editing as well as equipment, and other costs like technical and administrative staff for digital media content.
So lets just not ASSUME that costs will go down and therefore our prices will go down.
Why don't they do the same model as the newsstands- make 1 day's paper 99 cents. And you'll get a lot of people buying an e-paper once or twice a week.
Most people don't have time to read all or even most of a newspaper every single day. Just let people buy today's paper here and there when they have time for 99 cents a pop (or say 24 hours of access), and you'll sell hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Boom. There's your revenue model.
Most people don't have time to read all or even most of a newspaper every single day. Just let people buy today's paper here and there when they have time for 99 cents a pop (or say 24 hours of access), and you'll sell hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Boom. There's your revenue model.
Its not all that stupid,
Here in my town I would have to pay almost 3 Dollars for NY Times.
That comes to 90 Dollars a month.
I'm not always buying the NY times for that reason, but its not all that silly if they want to charge 30 dollars a month.
Although 15 is reasonable to me.
Here in my town I would have to pay almost 3 Dollars for NY Times.
That comes to 90 Dollars a month.
I'm not always buying the NY times for that reason, but its not all that silly if they want to charge 30 dollars a month.
Although 15 is reasonable to me.
How successful? The issue isn't revenue. It's whether their business model is viable. They are trying to superimpose their print business model on their online presence... we are talking apples and oranges.
There is PLENTY of revenue in a properly executed online model... but using online, and trying to make IT fit into a solution for a bloated carcass of print media, dooms the entire enterprise to failure.
Nastebu, there are PLENTY of online news pages that generate fantastic revenue based on their quality of content, and advertising revenue numbers.
People without an understanding of how to monetize a website at the NY Times, or anywhere else, should quit trying to stuff an elephant into a bullet train. It won't work.
Online content revenue models resemble print, almost not at all.
If you have a patient with a severed femoral artery, okay... yes, you might be able to sustain their life for a period with constantly infusing bags of blood to them. If the patient still bleeds out and dies, how is that the fault of the infusion device. It does what it does just fine, thank you.
There are too many hacks that don't know anything about the web, and how it can be monetized. Quality content and offers with a high perceived value that solve the "problems" of the readers can make more than enough money. Expecting a revenue stream that more than supports itself, to make enough revenue to save a crap business model from imploding is a completely unreasonable business expectation.
What really needs to happen is NYT should firewall the ad revenue management of the online side from the print side, and run it as a separate ad network, or at least run the iPad version from a completely different server and API, from the regular website.
Amazon has full NYT for $13.99 a month on the Kindle. I though that was too high and did not subscribe. They also offer a "Latest News" version with 20 or so articles that gets updated 3-4 times a day for $1.99 a month. That's what I went with on Kindle and would be happy to have the same on iPad. Don't have the time needed daily to read the full NYT!
Sure there are people who will pay > $350 a year for a NYT subscription. And there's nothing wrong with that, I just think the number of those people is small and getting smaller every year, and newspaper subscription trends bear this out.
If they sell a subscription to 50,000 people at $30/mo, that's $1.5M/mo.
If they sell a subscription to 500,000 people at $10/mo., that's $5.0M/mo.
The extra distribution in digital form costs them relatively little.
Who knows what the real numbers are, where the tipping point of "it's a good value" is? But I sure don't know many people (probably NONE) who would pay $20 or more per month, for one news source. And if you choose to keep your readership very small by charging high prices, you will lose mindshare over time.
If they sell a subscription to 50,000 people at $30/mo, that's $1.5M/mo.
If they sell a subscription to 500,000 people at $10/mo., that's $5.0M/mo.
The extra distribution in digital form costs them relatively little.
Who knows what the real numbers are, where the tipping point of "it's a good value" is? But I sure don't know many people (probably NONE) who would pay $20 or more per month, for one news source. And if you choose to keep your readership very small by charging high prices, you will lose mindshare over time.
Again I would suggest Google:
Try the google reader. It does pretty much what you are describing.
http://www.google.com/reader/view/
Just a suggestion...
The Gaurdian USED to be good many years back when they wrote more anonymous articles (similar to the way the Economist articles are presented). Then the egotists at the Gaurdian decided that every article should be a propaganda piece for the article's author. Now we have commentary by every Tom Dick and Harry and a crappy paper.
Okay, let's assume they are focusing on current subscribers and not those that refuse to pay for any content.
They cannot price below cost and they have to know that iPad subscriptions will cut into hardcopy subscriptions. So, take the hardcopy subscription price, back-out the printing and distributions costs, then add whatever added costs their are to iPad edition (links to video, etc). Probably gets us back to ~$15/month with the added environmental benefits of less tree death and delivery driver mileage (you laugh but if the carbon tax is enacted this is a a real cost).
Look to see a price war between the NYT and WSJ.
They cannot price below cost and they have to know that iPad subscriptions will cut into hardcopy subscriptions. So, take the hardcopy subscription price, back-out the printing and distributions costs, then add whatever added costs their are to iPad edition (links to video, etc). Probably gets us back to ~$15/month with the added environmental benefits of less tree death and delivery driver mileage (you laugh but if the carbon tax is enacted this is a a real cost).
Look to see a price war between the NYT and WSJ.
$20 a month would be a lower subscription price, so would $30. The "intro" price for a print subscription is about $8/week or $32/month and that is at a 50% discount, which brings it up to about $60/month for print, so a regular digital subscription at $30 is about a 50% lower price than the print product, or is my math wrong?
I don't know the exact print and distribution costs per issue but I would imagine that it is not much more than 50%, from what I have heard in book publishing it is approximately 30% of the cost of a book so 50% sounds like a reasonable guess, given that newspaper printing is a lot less expensive than book printing, and they don't have to deal with covers and binding.
Do you know what the per issue cost of producing a newspaper the scale of the Times is before printing and distribution? I'm not sure off hand what their profit margin is but I know that it is not as high as that of the drug industry or wall street banks. Sure it would be great to have it at 25 cents a day but if they can't pay the cost of production and make a profit then they will go out of business.
But the Newspaper *is* a different business model, and the question is how to get something like a newspaper to pay for itself online. Ad revenue alone doesn't do it. They do need to find a way to make subscriptions work.
A sight like Macrumors does very well financially because it keeps down its costs. Writing, editing, and research are a much smaller percentage of the overhead at a sight like this, or Arstechnica, Engadget, etc. That model won't work for a quality newspaper, which needs time to develop stories and the editorial staff to fact check etc.
Yes, that might be superimposing a print model on the web, but the alternative is to superimpose a web model on all of our news--with the result that we'll be left with ad supported, but very thin and shoe-string models of journalism.
Up to now the print subscriptions at the NYT has subsidized the web site. That was never a sustainable business model. The idea was that eventually ads would make the website pay for itself, but that simply hasn't happened. You can make all the noise about ways to monetize websites, but there's no magic bullet. The NYT is neither stupid nor clueless. They're trying to make something work that has never worked before.
This is why I wished Amazon would push real purchase numbers for the Kindle.
I subscribe to a regional paper on the Kindle. Offers regional news and sports, has a good national and international section (mostly ap reprints), opinion section, ect. for $5.99 a month.
For that paper, it's an extra $6 a month that they can't get from me any other way, being outside their normal delivery area.
No fancy (And pointless BTW), video, interactive media, or that other BS some of these newspaper sites try to do. It's just articles, to read.
I wonder what these papers are seeing as far as income.
I subscribe to a regional paper on the Kindle. Offers regional news and sports, has a good national and international section (mostly ap reprints), opinion section, ect. for $5.99 a month.
For that paper, it's an extra $6 a month that they can't get from me any other way, being outside their normal delivery area.
No fancy (And pointless BTW), video, interactive media, or that other BS some of these newspaper sites try to do. It's just articles, to read.
I wonder what these papers are seeing as far as income.
Considering the quality of their reporting in the last 10 years or so, that isn't necessarily a correct statement.
Oh stop. In 2009 alone the NYT won 5 Pulitzers. It won 15 from 2001-2007. No paper has won more in the last 10 years.
I think as Humans as a whole. We're taking a step back from quality news sources and more towards websites like Digg...
**** Talker Starts Crap With 67 Yr Old Man; Gets Ass Beat -- Sorry, but this ISN'T NEWS
**** Talker Starts Crap With 67 Yr Old Man; Gets Ass Beat -- Sorry, but this ISN'T NEWS
none of those sites produces any news. They just aggregate stuff from real providers like nyt, ap, bloomberg, time, CNN. We need to find a way to keep jounalists and editors employed or our news turns into a free for all of uninformed opinion and screaming.
I will pay for fact-checked news with correct spelling and punctation.
14.95/month
This very page had an ad for nyt reader (built using adobe air) for $14.95/month. Sounds totally equivalent.
This very page had an ad for nyt reader (built using adobe air) for $14.95/month. Sounds totally equivalent.
It's funny because lowering the price to gain more customers is *exactly* the argument used against Apple, an argument which is disagreed with so passionately around here.
Unsustainable, but $30 is too...
I have been an avid reader and subscriber of The Economist. I am willing to pay for quality content and I know that the free model is not sustainable in the press. HOWEVER, $30 purely for the digital edition is just plain crazy and I hope that those, charging this sort of price will face the embarrassment of failure.
What really worries me is that Apple and publishers are pushing a model, whereby electronic editions of books sell for the same amount or even higher than paper copies. That disregards the whole industry of bookstores and printers, letting alone the cost of shipping and handling.
Stupid us, we thought that the digital revolution would enrich us culturally for less. It seems, some think that they can charge us more for less.
Digital piracy has never had so many supporters.
I have been an avid reader and subscriber of The Economist. I am willing to pay for quality content and I know that the free model is not sustainable in the press. HOWEVER, $30 purely for the digital edition is just plain crazy and I hope that those, charging this sort of price will face the embarrassment of failure.
What really worries me is that Apple and publishers are pushing a model, whereby electronic editions of books sell for the same amount or even higher than paper copies. That disregards the whole industry of bookstores and printers, letting alone the cost of shipping and handling.
Stupid us, we thought that the digital revolution would enrich us culturally for less. It seems, some think that they can charge us more for less.
Digital piracy has never had so many supporters.
For $30, I want:
For $30, I want the electronic edition:
- to include the iPad or something similar, preferably with a decent e-ink solution
- to include the paper copies (frankly, the traditional copies are not much more expensive, in fact you can subscribe and get a discount)
- to include porn and I mean proper, tasteless hardcore stuff!
- frankly, for $30, I would expect some body contact...
For $30, I want the electronic edition:
- to include the iPad or something similar, preferably with a decent e-ink solution
- to include the paper copies (frankly, the traditional copies are not much more expensive, in fact you can subscribe and get a discount)
- to include porn and I mean proper, tasteless hardcore stuff!
- frankly, for $30, I would expect some body contact...