6 ms·

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but: I would love to subscribe to NYT digital editions, but why must the digital edition cost almost as much as the paper edition?

• cageface 13y ago
  Seriously? An extra dollar a month is a dealbreaker for you?
  • ajays 13y ago
    I dunno, maybe our math is different, but how are you getting $1/month difference?
• ddebernardy 13y ago
  Not sure what you're complaining about... It's $5 for 12 weeks...
  • abat 13y ago
    That's just the intro price. It's $5/WEEK if you want nytimes.com + tablet apps. That's $260/year instead of $22/year. I would gladly subscribe if the long term rate was $5 for 12 weeks. See full prices here: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.html http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...
    • fragsworth 13y ago
      Yeah, that's too much. And that's just for the NY Times... how many other sites are you supposed to pay for? I feel like there should be some technical way to handle letting a user pay a flat amount, and distribute the proceeds to the sites you actually visit, in a sort of fair way.
      • null_ptr 13y ago
        Maybe there should be one umbrella corporation that owns all media sites, that way we could pay the umbrella corporation a monthly fee and be done with it.
        • Alphasite_ 13y ago
          I hope that you're joking...
          • dredmorbius 13y ago
            The idea of some sort of syndicated media fee has occurred to me in the past. The main problem I see is that there's a fairly strong argument to paying based on your ability, so that wealth customers ought to pay more. Pricing information goods is hard.
            • mattlutze 13y ago
              Um... The main problem is that it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority (people are people and the fund will not be unlimited dollars) are prioritized over others, so that the only news will eventually be that which will be known to get you paid. I.e., the controlling body -- I'm guessing a government entity, here -- will be the sole voice of the fourth pillar, and the whole notion of press freedom is buried and forgotten.
              • dredmorbius 13y ago
                it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority And that's precisely what you've got now, except that the paying authority is advertisers, with access mediated by whatever roadblocks Google's thrown at SEO this week. In earlier schemes, you got the content preferred by patrons (royalty and/or the Church), or what could support small roving troups of actors, players, musicians, bards, raconteurs, etc. Back in the 1980s I was watching an early "festival of computer animation" and noticed that shorts from cigarette advertisments (largely from Europe) featured heavily. It was, effectively, the Church for patronage of CGI development (nascent and expensive at the time). The syndication need not be through a single agency, and there are existing examples in the music industry (not that that's perfect either): you've got The Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. For airtime play there is both logs (of airplay) and sampling methods to determine who gets paid for what. The licensing even covers live performance venues such as bars and nightclubs. There it's the club owner, not the band, who has the license for performances (it's much easier to conduct audits and enforcement against a street address than with a band whose location isn't fixed, has few assets, and can scatter to the winds). The other question is how to link receipt and payment. In many locations, Internet access is sufficiently concentrated (often monopolized) that tying major providers into the scheme might work. Access bundles could be tied to your Internet subscription, possibly with tiers of service or credits available for content. This removes the problem of subscribing individually to different source publishers, though it could drive up the cost of Internet access. Another approach would require more government involvement, essentially an income- or wealth-indexed content tax (addressing the "ability to pay" scenario). Collections are based on payment ability, _distribution_ is based on actual access and utilization. There are a lot of thorny details, and the question of whether or not there's a process path from the present system to something resembling what I'm suggesting is very much unsettled. Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart, the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways.
    • gizzlon 13y ago
      Just as a reference point: the digital only edition of one of the largest newspapers here in Norway is ~7$ per week and with the paper edition it's ~13$
      • aestra 13y ago
        Quick reference doesn't matter in this case, they don't compare... The average income in Norway is $6909 (USD), monthly and the average income in the United States (which is kinda a useless stat since cost of living is significantly different in different places) is $2678 (USD) monthly. I used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway for quick stats.
• aheu 13y ago
  Maybe the creation of the content is the expensive part. You still need someone creating it and laying it out on the page with proper graphics. This is just a guess though. I would be curious what their expenses are like digital vs paper.
• jld 13y ago
  The print version is subsidized by a lot of very expensive print space.
• crazygringo 13y ago
  The answer isn't environmentally friendly, but it has solid business logic behind it. From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital. Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally. Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.
  • beachstartup 13y ago
    yes, the economist does this as well. generalized rule: in order to promote sales of product X, make it only slightly more expensive than the one it is marginally superior to.
  • eurleif 13y ago
    >Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally. Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?
    • dsr_ 13y ago
      Oh, no. Print advertisers are almost completely unable to gather meaningful statistics. Prices are determined by circulation x a fuzzy notion of impact.
  • ajays 13y ago
    On the other hand: with the digital edition, they are able to track _each_ and _every_ thing you do on their site, and sell that data to advertisers. Try doing that with the paper version.
• Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Well from what I've seen, the online version has no ads, while I'm sure the print version does; that'd compensate for the difference in price. They could reduce the online price if they plastered it with ads, but then, people would complain even more because they're paying for a site with ads (???) (and they don't complain about a newspaper with ads because they know it reduces the price). tl;dr: you pay for content without ads, instead of a disposable paper version with ads.
  • ajays 13y ago
    If they guaranteed an ad-free paper, and guaranteed that they would not share my info with anyone else, then the price would be more appealing. But they don't.
• beggi 13y ago
  You're paying for content - not paper.
• majani 13y ago
  They are doing value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing. They feel that the content is worth 5 bucks, and so do their hundreds of thousands of online subscribers. If you don't, no love lost. There are other places you can get your news.
• mattlutze 13y ago
  You can get internet and mobile access for $3.75 a week. http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.html http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm... All of that content, written, designed and published by some of the best news producers in the world. It's instantly accessible, from anywhere you are. Updated all the time. I simply cannot understand how you could argue all of that is worth no more than $1. Even $5 a week for an Internet/mobile subscription is reasonable considering the volume of edited and proofed material you get. It's unfortunate that the mashables and reddits of the world have so soundly devalued the expectation of quality in news reporting.
  • brianbreslin 13y ago
    Why do they split out the pricing for smartphone and tablet? I think the digital should be one flat fee, so I can switch between my devices (#firstworldproblem) .
    • gumby 13y ago
      Split price for "smartphone and tablet" is only for people who use their stupid app. Reading via an RSS reader or even web browser is far more convenient anyway.
• gumby 13y ago
  The crazy thing is: I just tried to change my Economist subscription from print to online only since I no longer read the paper version. They wrote back and suggested I _not_ do so since the price/week is HIGHER for online-only than for print (which includes free online access). I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.
• arkj 13y ago
  Though off topic, I couldn't agree more. Get the pricing right and then designs will matter more.