The masthead of The Australian was partially covered yesterday with a sticker promoting a $10 28-day home delivery / digital subscription offer.
While the masthead and editorial content coverup is disappointing, the offer itself got my attention. For 35 cents a day subscribers get the paper (six out of seven days) and digital access. The usual price – as promoted on the sticker – is $1.42 a day (over seven days).
The cynic in me wonders how much the subscription offer is about driving digital subscriptions compared to print subscriptions. If you look at the subscription offers for The Australian you can see that a six day home delivery subscription is $8.95 while a seven day digital subscription is $2.95. On that basis, News is indicating that printing and distribution cost $6.00, or $1.00 a day. Take away newsagent commission and the delivery fee and then factor in the cost of printing and trucking the newspaper wonder how much News makes from print. The digital product is 100% News. The key is reader engagement with advertising and whether News can get to a point of making anything close to advertising from digital as it does from print.
So, I do wonder how much these bundled, print and digital, offers are about migrating people to digital. Overseas experience indicates that it’s a successful strategy for growing digital engagement.
As a retailer selling newspapers I don’t like these stickers as they seek to get people engaging less with my newsagency.
Page 2 and 3 of Sunday’s Telegraph were full page adverts for digital and digital/home delivery combos. Not good for distributors or retailers.
is it time to call their bluff, give us a fairer share of the pie or find another distribution system for the papers? no doubt print is in terminal decline, we are only useful until they can migrate sufficient numbers to digital, them watch them give us the flick !!!
Rick it’s a very tough call for newsagents.
Mark, I assume you’ve seen the Age today – Wed 5 June. Apparently headlines and news dont sell anymore. The main news item of the day is that David Jones is having a sale…..just wow. The Age banner and branding now sits on top of a massive David Jones advert as the message of what that brand means to the prospective customer. I have to admit Im staggered. I guess income is income and full marks for being innovative but I can just imagine the call in the news room. HOLD THE FRONT PAGE………Ive got a DJs advertisement. Kind of sums up where we are I suppose.
I would like a representative from each paper to spend a day in a newsagency when they do the front page as an ad, all I have been asked all day is “are you sold out of heralds?” Yesterday with the Telegraphs being blue for origin all I was asked is “are you sold out of Teles?” We haven’t moved the papers at all but people just instinctively see it as something different if anything I would think that these ads would affect the actual sales of papers adversely.
We found it amusing that the Tele’s were blue for tonight’s origin, and the SMH’s were red. Almost a maroon colour on a Sydney paper on origin day?
Gave us a chuckle, anyways…
Subaru, it’s the small things that get us through the day really isn’t it.