Re:Moving the Washington Post to HTTPS
by thetmkay on Thursday December 10, 2015 @05:44PM
(#10714160)
I personally don't see print media going extinct (books certainly didn't) but I'd hypothesise that availability and convenience is more important than price for the average NYT reader.
I think this is complicated by perceived fairness: normal people do not view different formats as separate products and even people who aren't particularly price sensitive will bristle at something which they see as unfair.
Since there's no way to buy an ad-free copy of the NYT, all of their existing customers have been trained to think of the fair price as what a paper subscription costs with little thought about how much of that is subsidized by advertisers.
Even high-income people are sensitive to these effects – Doc Searls wrote about a similar problem where the New Yorker's intro pricing made him feel like he was being ripped off, even though I'm certain the cost isn't a noticeable financial issue for him:
https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-...
(If the ecological cost of all of that unread paper bothers you, you can put in long-duration vacation stops or, in the case of the NYT, have your paper copy sent to a school instead)