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Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

The NY Times really needs to stop with the nickel and dime differential pricing tactics. Every time I consider getting a subscription, I look at the options and get pissed off: they are either artificially limited to only some of my devices (phone or tablet, but not both) or absurdly expensive at $8.75/week for access on all devices. NY Times, this is bullshit: if I'm going to be a subscriber, I want a reasonable rate and unlimited access to all of what the publication has to offer but I'm not going to pay $455/year for it. If you stop jerking your readers around and give them a good deal, you may be surprised by how many would be willing to subscribe.

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Sunday home delivery is cheaper than unlimited online access, but includes unlimited online access. I go that route.

One of my neighbors started stealing the paper, recently, so I don't even have to take it to the recycling bin myself. What a deal! Not exactly how I'd run _my_ business, though.

Ultimately, I read the Times every day on my phone and computer, and often peruse the archives, so I'd be happy to pay more. But I'd like transparency and to not play the game that ups their offline circulation numbers.

I'd also like the ads to go away, so that I'm paying for the journalism, not the advertisers. But whatever, I'll take what I can get.

It's violently offensive that I have to take delivery of a giant rolled-up paper bale every week if I want a good deal on unlimited digital access.

Until the rocket scientists at the NYT get that through their pointy little heads, nothing is going to change.

You could have your paper copy delivered to a nursing home, a school, the ebola isolation ward at a hospital, a shelter, or some such place where they would appreciate a free Sunday Times (after asking first, of course).

It does make business sense to delay the inevitable for a while. My understanding is that print ads pay better than the mobile/desktop ads.

That said, it's kind of disingenuous of the Times to charge the advertiser for an impression when I just recycle my paper without reading it.

Most people are happy to take that deal though: a cheaper subscription and a print edition every week. It's also more profitable for the New York Times. So those rocket scientists are unlikely to change their minds while that is the case.

>It's violently offensive that I have to take delivery of a giant rolled-up paper bale every week if I want a good deal on unlimited digital access.

"violently offensive"? Without getting into a debate about the environment... hyperbole much? It's amazing what people get violently offended by in the first-world. What a sense of entitlement we all have. Sorry someone who works on pricing at the NY Times made a mistake and it offended you so much. I guess when you watch the news and see all the pain and suffering around the world for no reason you must get nuclear offended, right?

Looks like you've deployed more electrons to complain about my choice of phrase than I spent writing it. Does that qualify as irony, hypocrisy, or both?

> Looks like you've deployed more electrons to complain about my choice of phrase than I spent writing it. Does that qualify as irony, hypocrisy, or both?

Oh sorry did my comment also "violently offend" you? People are offended by a lot of things these days. I think it's worth pointing out when the word is used frivolously - because it's an important word.

It's obviously a psychological pricing mechanism

The NYTimes subscription model is one of the few benign-sounding things in the world that makes me actively angry.

Their pricing model charges you X for Web access. Okay so far. They've decided to charge for content. Fine.

Their pricing model charges you (X+Y) for web+smartphone. I'm not going to say this is stupid, because obviously apps cost money to develop. Sure, it's the same content I'm viewing on 2 devices, but I'm downloading some app that took literally WEEKS to develop, so I get it.

Their pricing model charges you (X+Z) for web+tablet. This is starting to get silly because I can't really understand why a tablet app costs more to develop than a smartphone app, and anyway, I'm already paying for your content in the "web" portion.

Here's where it gets insulting, and where I refuse to give them a goddamned penny. Web+smartphone+tablet. First off, you're telling me that it's not good enough to pay for web+tablet? I have to pay extra for a smartphone on top of that? Okay, but surely I pay a discounted smartphone rate, right? It's, like, (X+Z+(.5Y)), right? There's no way the esteemed NYTimes would think their customers are so bloody stupid as to not only pay for smartphone access on top of tablet access, but pay FULL PRICE for said smartphone access, right?

WRONG.

NYTimes wants you to pay 2X+Y+Z for web+web+tablet+smartphone access. Look it up, I'm not joking here. They insist that their product is so valuable, that not only should you pay extra to access their web content on a tablet or smartphone, and not only should you pay the SAME AMOUNT for each of the web+tablet+smartphone, they think their customers are so bloody stupid that they should double pay for web content. Their most valuable customers, who want to pay for all digital access should be the ones who get ripped the most.

And, as pointed out elsewhere in these comments, this is more than paying for dead trees shipped to your house every day, and throwing them in the trash.

And then their advertising materials treat their allegedly valuable content as if I'm buying some cut-rate TV service. 4 week teaser rates. Really? 4 week discounts on content that, I'd hope, most users would plan to subscribe to for years if not decades?

Get over yourselves, NYTimes. You've turned a class of people who would otherwise respect your work and who actually desire to pay for it into people who actively dislike you and celebrate your failure.

> If you stop jerking your readers around and give them a good deal, you may be surprised by how many would be willing to subscribe.

If you don't think $450 is worth unlimited online access and home delivery for the Sunday edition, I'm not sure what to do for you. The main cost of reading the news is the time you lose. Why would you spend several hours per week reading something that you think isn't worth $8 per week? It's an inherently contradictory position.

> The main cost of reading the news is the time you lose. Why would you spend several hours per week reading something that you think isn't worth $8 per week?

There are at least two valid reasons. First, the time cost and the money cost are additive. It could be that you value reading the news at more than the time it takes to do it but not by $450/year.

Second, there is an opportunity cost. It's plausible that you might be choosing between two newspapers that have comparable coverage, in which case the subscription rate (or lack thereof) could easily break the tie.

Money and time aren't always fungible, but since you consider them additive in your argument lets assume they are for this discussion.

Starting software engineers bill out at $100 an hour. If you spend 5 hours a week reading the news, the total cost per year in terms of your time is $26,000. Thus the cost of the newspaper itself is 1.7% of the overall cost. The claim that a price cut to something that only contributes 1.7% to the total cost is going to make reading the newspaper worth it is ridiculous on its face. The same rebuttal applies for differentiating between newspapers.

Also, there is a strong argument to be made that businesses should not be targeting or care about people who think a 1.7% price cut makes a difference.

> Money and time aren't always fungible

Things don't have to be fungible to be cumulative.

> Starting software engineers bill out at $100 an hour.

Billing rates are irrelevant because time and money are not fungible. For example, I can read the newspaper on the train for 25 minutes each way, but it isn't possible to productively use that time for much else because of the constraints of the environment, so the value (i.e. opportunity cost) of using that time is much lower than most other times.

Also, most New York Times readers are not software developers. The average American hourly wage is less than a quarter of the one you're using.

> The claim that a price cut to something that only contributes 1.7% to the total cost is going to make reading the newspaper worth it is ridiculous on its face.

Amdahl's law explains why this is wrong. If you pay $2000/month for a mortgage, why squabble over $40/month difference in the interest rate? Because $40/month is $40/month. You gain more by reducing a $2040/month expense to $2000/month (even though it's only a ~2% reduction) than by reducing a $20/month expense to $1/month (even though it's a 95% reduction). The percentage of the total is completely irrelevant.

> Amdahl's law explains why this is wrong.

Amdahl's law doesn't mean what you think it means; it specifically refutes your position. To spell it out: a 100% reduction in 1.7% of the cost is irrelevant to the total cost despite the fact that 100% is a big number.

Your argument is that you spend time value equivalent of $2167/month reading the news, so the monetary cost of a subscription is inconsequential in comparison. The point of Amdahl's law is that a small percentage of a large percentage can be just as just as consequential as a large percentage of a small percentage. So because ~$2200/month is such a significant percentage of your total income, reducing it by 1.7% is not irrelevant. $8/week is $8/week regardless of whether it's a small percentage of a large number or a large percentage of a small number.

Why would you spend several hours per week reading something that you think isn't worth $8 per week?

Worms, meet the world outside the can. You're going to love it.

COMPLETELY agree. In fact, just 3 days ago I managed to cancel my NY Times subscription entirely, precisely for the reason you mention.

I'd been paying them $240 a year for their hackassed 'you can read it on a tablet and the web but not on a phone' plan. Then I got the new iPhone XXL, and suddenly was interested in reading news on my phone after all (since this new model finally has a screen big enough to read text on).

But I couldn't, due to having the wrong subscription type, and then I had to do the multiple-annoying-step process of finding the old subscription, turning it off, then adding the new subscription that let me read it on a phone and the web but NOT on a tablet... at the end of which their app told me I had to log in. Which I did, but it then told me 'Fuck you, customer, that email is associated with a different subscription' (to paraphrase).

So I just canceled everything and deleted the NY Times app.

In this era, it's an amazing achievement to get a lot of people willing to pay money to read your news content. It's sad that the NY Times fucked that up so badly with their insane pricing and convoluted subscription choices.

> I want a reasonable rate and unlimited access to all of what the publication has to offer but I'm not going to pay $455/year for it.

Would it help if you thought of the New York Times not as that disposable paper publication available for roughly $3 at every airport and newsstand, but as a hip new digital news service that sources original journalism from trained professionals, and curates that content by an (ideally) independent cadre of other professionals?

How much would you pay for that hot new subscription service, to fund the level of baseline quality you get from the NYT? I don't know about you, but even $5/week doesn't sound completely unreasonable, to have something a little more sober than Buzzfeed and Vice.

> How much would you pay for that hot new subscription service, to fund the level of baseline quality you get from the NYT? I don't know about you, but even $5/week doesn't sound completely unreasonable.

I don't know. But I pay $8.95 a month for Netflix, another $9 for Hulu Plus, another $9 for Spotify. I also get Amazon Prime for about $8/month and HN/reddit are free. It's not whether NYT is worth $35+/mo, it's whether I can derive $35/mo of utility from it.

Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify etc. are all benefiting from the old model of media. Albums, TV shows and movies make back their production costs (in the whole, if not individually) through theaters/DVD/album sales, and then Netflix/Hulu/Spotify buy the streaming rights, which are all gravy at that point. They're not sustainable models. The New York Times is further along a curve where digital eats the old media model, and is having to adapt sooner.

I was with you until you put Vice in bed with Buzzfeed.

I agree that given the content is what you're looking for, the price really isn't that obscene. But the nickle and dime/piecemeal aspect of it is.

One of the NYTs main competitors is The Guardian, who now have a pretty nice app themselves, free with ads or ~$4/month for the premium version (which is ad-free and includes interactive crosswords and some premium content).

With the Guardian website also being totally free and their online circulation rapidly increasing, I'd say the NYT should be watching carefully.

The cover price of the nytimes print is $2.50 and $6 on Sunday.

It's gone up a lot in the past decade, I remember when it was $1, I think. Although I am having surprising trouble finding historical single-issue or subscription print prices on the web.

But I think people used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for print subscriptions, even back when the weekday cover price was only $1. Of course, there was less competition for world news pre-internet, but, as much as I'm unwilling to pay those prices either, I also understand that there's no way they can keep producing the same coverage on orders of magnitude less income.

It also felt like you were getting a lot more, with a guy dropping a physical paper off at your door every morning.

Yea, but that's for print. Not operating a printing facility HAS to bring the costs down, no?

Well first there is more than printing there is distribution and paper cost, power etc but I'm guessing you are wrapping that all into "printing facility" anyway.

But here's the thing. Printing is somewhat efficient if you look at it from a manufacturing standpoint. A huge machine spitting out automatically a bunch of papers taking a web of paper and a final folded product ready for the drivers to take to delivery spots all over. (I was in the industry years ago it's a well oiled machine of productivity for what it does. Same thing every day.)

Of course that costs money but typically the cost of the delivered paper is supposed to cover all of that. Break even as the story is told. Subscription price covers the cost of the printing and distribution so they can sell ads and claim circulation. The high priced ads cover the price of the other structure which they still have to pay even if they discontinue the print operation and that of course (look they have a building and staff in Manhattan) is super expensive.

Yes, but it also reduces revenue from ads. I don't know if there are ads in the Times' apps, but even if so, web and in-app advertising prices generally have much lower profit margins than print advertising AFAIK.

For anyone who isn't aware, NYTimes has a steeply discounted subscription rate for college students that can be tremendously helpful for light research (it gives access to their full online archives): http://www.nytimes.com/College

Agreed. Back when you could give them somewhere around $8/mo, I did that. A few months later, they emailed saying they were canceling the plan. I think a lot of people would happily give them $8/mo for no incremental cost. That's all to the bottom line.

They used to be able to support their main business with the print revenues, and the online subscribers were all (as you note) marginal money on top of that. With print revenues declining, that may not be possible anymore, and if it still is possible it probably isn't for much longer. They need to find some way to transition to a model where digital-only revenue pays the bills.

Finding the right point on the supply-demand curve is key to this. Their current strategy is trying to have their cake and eat it too. What I'm arguing they need to do is stop playing games trying to charge the few people who don't care about cost more and focus on the much larger market of people who are happy to pay what they feel is a fair rate for quality product. Apple nailed this when they priced songs and TV shows at 99¢. Amazon is killing it with affordable kindle offerings. The formula is pretty simple: good content, convenient access, and affordable pricing that feels fair to the consumer. The NY Times is succeeding at the first two and blowing it at the last one. As a result they are failing to capitalize on the broader market.

They have two problems here. One, they already have an option for price-sensitive consumers: free. They toyed with a full-on paywall, but that didn't work for a number of reasons (there's a lot of competition, and people LIKE sharing articles, so the ability to share articles with friends who don't have a Times subscription is actually an important feature for the website). Chasing after them with a low-cost subscription is a sucker's bet, since a lot of them won't budge from free, especially since the Times' limits on free articles per month is trivially circumvented.

Two, there's a gap between what people feel is a "fair rate" for the Times and what is actually a fair rate for the Times. People in this thread find it "violently offensive" that the print edition of the Times costs less than the digital-only version, despite the fact that if you look at the ad spending on each, it absolutely makes sense for the Times to charge you less if you buy the more fully ad-subsidized print version. And all of your comparisons (iTunes, Kindle) are third-party sellers of other people's works. They don't care if the writers or musicians make money or not. iTunes/Kindle also aren't the only source of income for those writers and musicians. The New York Times is responsible for providing its own content, and they need to make enough money to pay for that content.

Yea--they make it too confusing, and expensive. Offer a reasonable price for access to Everything--including archives. They emailed me so many times with pop up ads, or low introductructory access; I don't even bother to read their ads anymore. I don't think they realize just how fast people will look for that x box, it's like swatting an insect away from your face.

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