Raising the Price of a Subscription
Kottke points to an article in the New York Times about magazines raising their subscription costs to try to soften the advertising fallout. As the article acknowledges, “Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy.”
Funny enough, I mentioned just this last week in my exchange with Johnny: “I think there’s something funny about the newspaper industry crying about their product being undervalued when they’ve been the one undervaluing it for years (ahem 12 issues of a $5 magazine for $12).” The media industry set the value of news at free, meaning it’s really hard to blame consumers for not giving it much value.
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I agree with you, I think self-undervaluing has been a huge problem, particularly for mags. Reminds me of an anecdote from Robert Cialdini’s Influence (you’ve probably heard this one) about the shop owner who was struggling with moving merchandise, and tried the standard sales tactics such as setting up prominent displays and telling the staff to push the items hard– all to no avail. So a note was left for the staff to mark the items down ‘x 1/2,’ which the staff misread as ‘x 2,’ effectively doubling the price, the surprising end result of which being that the entire stock of items immediately sold out.
Maybe this post would’ve been better placed over there in your ‘counterintuitive’ list :-)
I think this is exactly backward. Vice Magazine has been thriving on a different model: always free, completely ad supported. They even actively discourage subscriptions because dealing with the distribution is expensive.
The magazine has a near 100% pickup rate, which is unheard of in the industry.
Imagine: how many more magazines would YOU read if there was a stack of titles-of-interest at your regular haunts?