The subscription-pocalypse

Re:The subscription-pocalypse by adrianN on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:18AM (#19016583)

Having a physical paper printed and delivered seems to be much more difficult than serving a website, as the latter has marginal cost close to 0. I think people are more understanding of paying a few bucks to get a pound of paper than paying a few bucks to open a website in their browser.

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by detritus on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:57AM (#19016784)

My first job was at a regional newspaper and I recall one of the directors responding to my enquiry about the difference in cost of our two main titles - it might have been offered hyperbolically, but he stated that they were entirely arbitrary - they could in fact offer them for free if they chose (they in fact had some free downmarket titles). It was the advertising that paid for the entire enterprise. The cover price was simply a bonus and mostly went to the retailer.

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by chrisseaton on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:24AM (#19016615)

The crazy thing is that the digital only subscription is still over £300.

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.)

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by supahfly_remix on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:29AM (#19016635)

Prices are determined by what they are worth to the customer, not by the cost of goods. That must mean that someone is willing to pay that much for it. (I'm not).

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by chrisseaton on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:32AM (#19016649)

> Prices are determined by what they are worth to the customer, not by the cost of goods.

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.

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by pwg on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:47AM (#19016719)

> 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.

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by Beltiras on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:24AM (#19016613)

The marginal cost is only zero within each size category you exist in. It scales as you grow readership in strange ways. An additional 1000 subscribers might mean you need to spin up an extra VM to handle small loads. That's fine, still have marginal costs close to zero. At 10.000 more subscribers you need to diversify your coverage. More content producers cost money. 100.000 more subscribers some critical infrastructure breaks unless you employ sysadmins to manage it. And so on and so forth.

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Re:The subscription-pocalypse by Silhouette on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:51AM (#19016746)

Having a physical paper printed and delivered seems to be much more difficult than serving a website, as the latter has marginal cost close to 0.

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.

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