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.