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Man, these journalists are so nice compared to the Internet trolls I'm used to. I barely feel goaded into responding. But... - Do Time and The Economist actu

• psyklic 17y ago
  I found the original article insightful, but this journalist's rebuttals also bring up interesting points. - "Does content affect price?" It seems the journalist and PG define "price" differently -- is it the price to the consumer or to the publisher? Either way affects profit, so both seem valid to me. Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. The journalist also states that while the price to the consumer is not higher, the publishers' business model is to sell more copies at a lower profit margin per copy, which seems perfectly valid. - "Better journalism is slightly cheaper." In some cases, yes. In others, no. Arguing over Time vs. The Economist seems to not answer the broader question.
  • whopa 17y ago
    > Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. Is it really true that different authors can have wildly different royalty rates? I thought the range only spanned a few percentage points. Advances don't really count, since they are paid out of future royalties.
    • TomOfTTB 17y ago
      Of course it's true that authors make wildly different royalty rates. Does anyone here really believe Stephen King makes the same royalty rates per book as someone like Uwem Akpan? It's simple market economics. Stephen King will sell far more copies which means publishers will make far more money off his books. So he gets a significantly higher cut of the per book profit (aka royalties) because publishers will still end up making more money off his book than they will of a Uwem Akpan book. Put it this way, if Mr. King's publisher didn't pay him a higher royalty fee don't you think another publisher would be willing to based on the large amount of money at stake? So again we're back to basic economics.
      • whopa 17y ago
        Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm: "hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors" You talk about simple market economics, but the publishing industry seems to be a cartel, and authors are on the whole largely shafted. The music industry is the same way...
  • alextp 17y ago
    Well, one could measure Newsweek (5.95) versus New Yorker (4.99), and I think that if you ignore tabloids and very glossy magazines most news have the same price.
    • eru 17y ago
      And it does not really matter anyway. You pay for most newspaper and magazines by looking at the advertisements, the kiosk price is just a way to keep up the quality of the audience (and the appearance of quality of the paper) so that advertisers will pay more.
• jsz0 17y ago
  "but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the Times's web site." Not really true. NYT posts the bulk of their front page material online early in the morning. Usually 3-4AM Eastern. This usually includes editorials as well. I assume it goes live online when the articles are finalized for print. This isn't set in stone of course. So someone sleeping a normal schedule getting their paper at 7 or 8AM is seeing mostly fresh content.
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• frig 17y ago
  You are being pretty sloppy. If you go to an actual bookstore (or library) and look at newsstand prices for, eg, Canteen or Dwell or Parabola or Foreign Affairs or New Left Review or Ampersand or 34th Parallel (or god forbid Science + Nature) and so on you'd have a harder time arriving at such a neat relationship. Now, if you grouped by "content niche" and analyzed each niche separately you might find in some niches (like "news", specifically) a clean relationship like what you proposed.
  • pg 17y ago
    Not really. My claim in the essay was that prices didn't depend on the quality of the content. All I needed to support that were a few counterexamples to anyone claiming they did. Though I did see evidence of a trend toward magazines being priced according to paper content, that would have been more than a I needed.
    • frig 17y ago
      You're smart enough to understand the concept of a statistical relationship, and also smart enough to know that single anecdotes ("my uncle smoked all his life and didn't get lung cancer") don't really prove anything about a statistical relationship. But look again at what you're claiming here: "price doesn't depend on quality of content". Here's the evidence you start from: - Time: lower quality content, ~$5 / issue - Economist: higher quality content, ~$7 / issue Which to an outside observer certainly doesn't look like a case of price not depending on quality of content. To turn the above facts into evidence for your claim you introduce a "price per page" metric, which lets you salvage your point at the expense of introducing a dubious metric. Leaving aside the dubiousness of the metric, your chosen datapoints don't hold up once you leave the newsstand: - 1 year of time: ~$20. http://www.amazon.com/TIME-1-year/dp/B00007BK3L/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=magazines&qid=1253463302&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/TIME-1-year/dp/B00007BK3L/ref=sr_1_1?i... - 1 year of the economist: ~$127. http://www.amazon.com/The-Economist/dp/B00077B7M6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=magazines&qid=1253463317&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/The-Economist/dp/B00077B7M6/ref=sr_1_1... Difference in quality of content may not be a complete explanation for the above differential, but I'd wager a guess it has something to do with it. And even at the newsstand you can find a wide range of price-per-sheet values (eg: 4c to 20c by my estimates), enough so that you could just as easily, say, have picked "Foreign Affairs" and "Time" and have it come out that higher quality content yields higher per-page prices. Which is why this looks like a sloppy generalization: you're trying to argue against a statistical relationship (generally "higher-quality content => generally higher prices") by means of anecdote, and not really a carefully-vetted anecdote at that (as evidenced in the subscription pricing).
• howardweaver 17y ago
  Paul -- I don't mean to be trollish at all. I think of what I did as more a "debugging" exercise :) * Yes, Time and The Economist have varied and sometimes opposite volumes. Your point just isn't meaningful. * This re-rebuttal doesn't address your original point, which wasn't so much about patterns vs books as it was your contention that content is all treated the same. Laura Bush hasn't sold any books yet, but she has the money. * I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it. * I really ought to avoid uppercase, you're right. But it's not the same point. The first is about inputs, the last about marketing and selling strategies. Quite different. best, Howard Weaver editor.blogspot.com
  • pg 17y ago
    I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it. That's more like it. You'll pick up trolling in no time.
    • aristus 17y ago
      For one, I think this is beneath you. Two, you have to expect stuff like this. When you use simplified models of painting or other activities to make your points, very few people are articulate enough to rebut you. But when you go after journos they have knives they've used on much tougher opponents. One of the ways they needle you is to quote you exactly and throw it into your face again and again. A related one is to deliberately misunderstand a point an rebut it with a more-memorable image (eg Laura Bush, who does not make more per-unit, but by that time you've lost the audience) and to repeat it (the dig about Lisp books, which makes even less sense). Referee says you both have points, were both a bit sloppy in supporting evidence. 10-minute timeout.
      • pg 17y ago
        I admit my tone was flippant, but there was a point underneath. The hallmark of a troll is to mischaracterize what you're saying. You never even reach the point of disputing the matter at hand; instead you argue about what you said. I was fooled by trolls the first couple times I encountered them, because I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to waste their time that way. From experience I learned a test for recognizing them: when I kept having to say "No, what I said was..." Now when I find myself about to say that, I just stop participating. My point with Mr. Weaver was simply that it was remarkable how quickly he'd independently reproduced the defining quality of trolls. It was funnier without all this explanation.
• comradity 17y ago
  Dear Paul Graham, We can argue about whose got better content all night long. However,the value of the content to the consumer is worth more than the words themselves. How does the content improve their lives - look smarter at a cocktail party, transform an otherwise mind-numbing train ride, decide what stock to buy, pick up a girl at a bar, break the ice at the beginning of a cold call with a sales prospect. What is all that worth? Have publishers charged enough? Has publisher marketing take advantage of this added value to generate more subscriptions? How much more value can be added with the interactivity and immediacy of new technologies and how publishers harvest and use this information to convince consumers to pay more. By the way, I wonder how many people told Steve Jobs that no one would pay for I-Tunes? I'd bet it was many. Katherine Warman Kern @comradity
  • netsp 17y ago
    comradity, I think you are missing the point. The essay doesn't discuss the value of this content but it's price. These are not the same. Price is somehere between the maximum the buyer is willing to pay, considering his other options & the minimum the seller is willing to sell at, considering his opportunity cost. In a competitive market, the price usually creeps close to the latter because consumers have more and better options to consider. In a monopolistic one, it creeps closer to the latter for the opposite reason. The reason the price of content might be zero in the content industry is that A) The opportunity cost for the seller is 0 & B) The market is more competitive.
    • comradity 17y ago
      I got the point exactly. You are assuming that the unit price and number of units garnered by the publishing industry reflects consumer demand. This is only true if the industry has used best practices in pricing and marketing strategy. I disagree with that assumption. As a former media planner, it appears that the publishing industry has been focused on generating revenues from advertisers. Period. But more concrete evidence of publishers' lack of marketing best practices is that publishers keep talking about selling content. Tide does not sell laundry soap. They sell superior clean. The value to the consumer can be very high or even priceless. For example, the value of getting the red wine stain out of that expensive tablecloth is very high, the value of being confident the kids look like their mom cares is priceless. Publishers need to stop taking marketing short cuts (giving away free copies, relying 3rd parties to sell subscriptions, reacting to social marketing, and buying into marketing gurus with silver bullet answers).