Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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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.

April 22, 2009