Seem to remember (this could be very fallible) I was paying around 50p for a Guardian or Telegraph in the 90s and early 00s. Tabloids might have been 25p or 30p. £1 and up feels far too much for a paper, even now.
Obviously we've all adjusted how we read as well. Instead of taking everything from one site we might graze half a dozen sites for news, and a full subscription might feel too much for any of them. The few lite subscriptions I've looked at didn't feel that light.
The majority of print revenue always came from advertising - a revenue stream that is apparantly drying up in the online era.
Thankfully my employer pays for another newspaper subscription (but not one I'd personally chose to take, which is why I looked at the Times.)
I know that. I never said anything about costs, so I'm not sure why you're telling me this.
> That must mean that someone is willing to pay that much for it.
I'm sure that's literally true. But they may be making a mistake and setting the price wrong for what the market could support and to maximise their income.
What we here do not know is whether they have already done that calculation and determined, based upon whatever basis they used for estimating, that their maximum income is, in fact, at their present price point.
Presumably much of the cost of serious journalism is in the journalism, not the mechanics. It would make sense for the online version to be somewhat cheaper than the paper one with physical delivery, but it wouldn't surprise me if the real difference in production costs was only a few pence plus whatever postage costs them.
I don't know how much my parents paid to get a physical newspaper delivered when I was growing up, but when I looked how much the Times costs to be delivered I was absolutely staggered that it would cost me nearly £500 a year.
I don't know if the price has changed, or my tolerance for subscription costs has changed, but as a millenial I can't even begin to justify spending that much money on a newspaper.