NYTimes: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions
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NYTimes.com + Smartphone = $15/month NYTimes.com + Tablet = $20/month NYTimes.com + Tablet + Smartphone = $35/month (WHAT?)
First, how does one differentiate the value add between a smart phone and a tablet enough to charge the sum of those parts, not an incremental addition?
Two, if you go with the cheapest print option (weekday) at $14.80 a month delivered to your house, you get all access across all devices. As one of my friends noted: how could they not look around and be inspired by digital companies that have millions of users on a few dollars a month on drip....but no. They still think of themselves as a print provider. Name another service we pay $15 bucks a month to access from our smartphone.
This seems like a print centric decision.
Which is, of course, still cheaper than the web+smartphone+tablet plan.
So: dead trees delivered to my door, six times per week: $1.50/week.
Bits which I have to go fetch myself, paying rather usurious bandwidth rates: $8.75/week.
Hmmmm. Something seems off here.
At $3.75 to $8.75 per week, I'd expect ads to be gone. Not that they need to be. It's just what I've come to expect.
The news publication industry is changing (along with the rest of the publication industry). I like the direction NYTimes is going in -- "For quality content, you should expect to pay real money" -- but the model has so much bad baggage attached to it that it seems doomed to failure, with The Times (London) being the most recent NYTimes-scale example.
It isn't free news that killed the newspapers.
It is their own so called news, which are mostly put there by pr companies or else are outright lies by politicians.
Daily Delivery (7 Days), $29.60 per four weeks
The Weekender (Friday–Sunday), $20.80 per four weeks
Sunday Only, $15 per four weeks
Weekday (Monday–Friday), $14.80 per four weeks
All Digital Access, $35 every four weeks
NYtimes.com + Tablet App, $20 every four weeks
NYtimes.com + Smartphone App, $15 every four weeks
So getting a weekday subscription at $14.80 gets you the $35 digital deal. I'm sure they won't mind if this drives some extra dead tree subscriptions.
.com, smartphone, and tablet should be less than the first two combined. Incentivise people to pay more by making it seem like less.
Or, you know, some of us may pay.
News is expensive! Don't be fooled that because commentary on news that others have gathered (e.g. HuffPo) is essentially free that it doesn't cost real money to send a reporter to some faraway place for 6 months to do some investigative journalism, then fact-check it and write it up...
The BBC is paid for by the British television license payer, not the taxpayer. Otherwise, spot on. Journalists need to eat, too.
The newspaper industry is the dying industry of our time, and desperation set in a while ago. The NYT took a bit longer to appear desperate because of it's generally more loyal readerbase and large coffers, while most small dailies & weeklies have either drastically reduced overhead or completely packed up already.
And many newspapers still turn a reasonable profit, it's just that the major metros can't earn enough to pay off all the debts left over from the major consolidations at the start of the decade. One reference to that effect: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-is-n...
The problem is that they can't charge that little compared to the paper delivery. Indeed, they must cut the paper cord and think digitally, small fee will multiply exponentially, worldwide.
Assuming that following one would count against the 20 free articles per month quota they've established, and that they're not planning an apocalyptic sweep of millions of inbound links.