Monthly Archives: May 2010

The Times is about to start charging £1 a day or £2 a week for access to its newspapers which I initially thought was expensive. Murray made a good point though- “This is symptomatic of people today, for some reason a lot of people expect to get most things for free these days. The Times is regarded as a quality paper and has the right to charge for quality journalism, they’re a business after all.” However, vboelema came up with “I guess for now I’ll be part of the 90%.” meaning that most people will not pay for the content.

It is a difficult line to tread, but maybe The Times pricing is not too bad when you consider the cost of the paper editions. The problem is that most people perceive, rightly or wrongly, that digital editions should either be free or very cheap. I listened to a radio interview the other day and it was apparent that the cost of producing the online edition of The Times is minimal in comparison to the paper one. Indeed, in response to the news that GQ Magazine had only sold 365 iPad magazine copies, the publisher said “This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage (…) Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”

Imagine Publishing offers its magazines for £1.99 per issue which compares well to the print editions in terms of cost and you can download each new issue directly from within the magazine app. Wired, however, has gone in a different direction; in the US you can get 12 issues (1 year) for $10 by subscription and you get a T-Short thrown in for good measure. For the same price you can pick up only 2 issues of the iPad edition of the magazine. How does that make sense? Yes it is interactive, but that does not justify such a price gap and I am convinced that many would pay $10 for a year’s worth of the iPad edition.

I am not saying that good quality content should not have a price, but that it should ‘always’ cost less than content printed on paper.