IPad deal: Publishers warn of hurdles

They're forced to depend on reader information because their advertisers demand it, and advertisers are where almost all of their revenue comes from. They only really charge you for the subscription because their advertisers would revolt otherwise -- it'd artificially inflate their perceived mindshare. Newsstand sales (which the Apple sales would be counted as) currently make them meager profits, are normally mostly pulped, and don't count towards the demographic data that actually pays for shit.

The analogy to music is bullshit -- Music publishers never had this direct demographic data, and don't sell ads based on it (product placement in pop music notwithstanding).

That information doesn't make sense for music companies because music companies don't give away their product and sell their readership to advertisers.

Newspaper subscriptions subsidize the cost of the product, but the news is just a loss leader. Newspaper publishers rely on selling their readers to advertisers. Without knowing exactly what that readership base consists of, they would have a harder time selling to advertisers, who wouldn't know what they're getting for their money.

"All these publishers need to do is focus on creating a quality product first, and who is buying it second."

Whether or not a publication is quality is in part a function of its readership demographics. US Weekly is a quality product for a subset of people, and The Economist is a quality product for a (mutually exclusive?) different subset.

The publishers need this data in order to determine the best way to make their product valuable for their readers. Without the data, it's like shooting in the dark.

The ads in magazines are just as relevant, IMO, as adsense ads (at least because print ads are targeting a demographic rather than direct intent), and Google seems to be doing an okay job with their method of ad targeting. The news/magazine publishing industry is stuck in a seriously delayed feedback loop, it can take months for an advertiser to see returns on their marketing/advertising investment. With things like adwords, you can see it almost instantly, and (assuming you have funnel analytics) almost down to the specific part of the page that generated revenue -- you can't do that at that kind of detail with magazines that are published on a slow cycle and are only accessible bulk (you buy/subscribe to the whole item, not access to individual entries, no one can track which parts of a 50 page magazine you read).