Posted on 09/10/2010 11:39:10 AM PDT by Rockitz
No matter how little is paid? Hmmmm. I suspect the long term subscibers paying a few dollars a weeks may be a bit peeved by this give away.
“I get offers from them a few times a year and I only make sure to send them back the postage paid envelope.”
Tape it to a brick or an old phone book. My dad asked repeatedly to be taken off of “Good Sam’s” mailing list. He finally got off after mailing them a chunk of granite about the size of a pet tombstone with the message “I have bigger ones.”
I have sent numerous old phone books to the NYT and some environmental terrorist group. I don’t give the ones I despise a return address so I can continue to get envelopes.
Back in the days when they were profitable, it was to distinguish themselves above the "rags". Not any different than schools like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc. keep tuition in lockstep to avoid creating the impression of being a "cheap second rate" school.
Straight advertising never was their bread & butter. It was classified advertising and Craigslist pretty much demolished that.
For ages now (decades I am sure) the newsstand and subscription rates for newspapers have been based on “getting what the market can bare” and neither one has been the financial mainstay of any newspaper. The key financial factor for newspapers has, for a long time, been their advertising revenue.
What do they get by nearly giving away the paper and paying the distributors to do the giving away? They get to tell their advertisers that they are reaching X number of readers, thus providing some justification for what they want to charge the advertisers, who provide most of their revenue.
It is a contest, for each newspaper, if they are setting newsstand and subscription rates that will hold, or grow, their “readership” numbers and thereby defend their advertising revenue. But, as you will see below, the ability to set those rates depends a lot on how attractive, to how many people, the newspaper is in the first place, and not just the newsstand or subscription rate alone.
The L.A. Times price is $.75 daily at the newsstand, or a $2.99/week subscription price (a 56% discount from the newsstand). The Wall Street Journal gets $2.00 at the newsstand (almost 3 times as much as the LA Times), or you can get a $119/year ($2.29wk) subscription (81% discount off the newsstand price). How can the Wall Street Journal charge so much more at the newsstand AND also give such a bigger discount with its subscription rate (a subscription rate that is LESS than the L.A. Times)? Readership, which translates to advertising revenue, and the L.A. times has a daily readership (at 2.1 million that is less than half the WSJ daily readership (at 4.7 million).
The $2.00 newsstand price of the WSJ also speaks to the dedication of a significant portion of its 4.1 million readers, verses the L.A.Times less secure hold on a readership to which it must offer its paper at only $0.75 at the newsstand.
Craigslist >;)
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