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WSJ's Online Subscriptions Outperform Print
ScentCone writes "The New York Post is reporting that the Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, is doing much better with its online publication than with print. Online subscribers pay $84/year, whereas print subscribers are still paying $356... and the profit on the online business is 20 times that of the paper flavor." From the article: "'They're simply losing market share to other media. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore,' said Feinseth. Kann is hoping that the company's long-range growth also comes in online publishing, which has profit margins at least 20-fold higher than print. The Wall Street Journal Online is signing up thousands of new subscribers, up 5.2 percent for the quarter, to a total of 731,000."
The real information gathered from the story is that consumers buying Wall Street Journal online are paying 20 times too much. They should be paying $4.20 a year.
At least competition will help as if there is so much money in something then everyone will be doing it.
It's only a short while til the NY Times, The Washington Post and other first-tier newspapers start charging for content. The only issue is which one will be first....
But now that your average PDA is small than the magazine, and you can get the latest news online, not to save the number of trees you save, there's not really a justification for having paper publication of periodicals.
But I still prefer reading my books on paper. And most people I know feel the same.
Iran captures three CIA agents
Harldly anyone subscribes to print newspapers, the days of the paperboy chucking the sunday edition into your rosebush or onto your roof have been gone for a long while.
People just pick it up when they stop to get gas/smokes/coffee/whatever, or just read the copy lying there on the subway, etc..
This doesn't take those kind of numbers into account. That is, this isnt saying more people read WSJ online than they do in print.
If I were to guess, I'd say most would prefer to read dead-tree material than read a computer or PDA screen. It's just so much more comfortable for the eyes, and easier to take to the john.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And that's only the subscriptions. Never mind the medium costs. Print costs are really expensive. Maybe some other Slashdotters would have better statistics available at hand, but I remember doing a print run of 1000 copies of a magazine with 32 pages in it for about $1000 (cdn). These days you can get free online webpages that'll handle bandwidth that matches that kind of distribution, whereas paper and ink costs haven't gone down all that much in the past few years.
All of these publications make their bank by overpricing their products to make even ripoff prices sound like a great deal. After all, why would any magazine give you a year's subscription for eighty or ninety percent below the cover price? Jack up the price on the cover so people think they're getting an amazing deal on a subscription while you still bring in large profits.
This is just the next extension. You think you're getting a great deal with your print subscription? How about an online subscription for even MORE savings?
I think that these online publications and their pricing schemes are only as successful as they are because they have such precedent as being a pricey product. It's why CD's are still $15, why purchasing digital music is around a buck a track, and why people buy books on amazon thinking that their 10% discount is amazing.
Project Gutenberg isn't cheap enough for you?
If you're someone who likes reading, there's so much more good stuff in there than you're likely to find on the bestsellers rack at B&N.
I'm not necessarily a "newer is better" type of person. I tend to like old movies, classic novels, and NES games. I'd rather read Dickens than Stephen King, and happen to think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote much better mysteries than Dan Brown (DaVinci code was IMO formulaic drek, why all the hype?)
YMMV
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Paper may be archaic, but I already spend enough of my day in front of a computer. I personally like to be able to read the hard copy.
Beyond less strain on the ol' peepers, it's nice to be able to get away from the computer. With the online version, it might not be DRMed, but I certainly can't easily take it with me wherever I go (sure, I can print things out, but that format is still less than ideal for me).
I agree that the online version might be great for some, but I'm not one of those people. And I've tried NewsStand and Zinio as well as the online versions of many papers.
Beyond what I've mentioned already... For my taste, the screen is too small a device for the display of articles. With a paper, I might have to turn a page once or twice.... with NewsStand and Zinio I found myself doing a constant 'pan and scan'. Online articles required too much scrolling and clicking of 'next'.
I'll stick with the dead tree format (I recycle, mind you), but agree that a paper specifically formatted for display on-screen might be a good thing.
not a chance in hell.
until the publishers accept a OPEN ebook format and standard it will never happen.
if I cant read that ebook I bought 5 years ago on the PDA I will purchase in 6 years it will fail horribly.
unrealistic you say? i'll remember that the next time I read a book that is over 10 years old.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I mean who would want a permanant record that can last for thousands of years and can still be read even if it becomes stained and worn unlike a CD?
Newspaper will *not* last thousands of years without proper archival procedures. Even trying to get them to last more than a hundred years can be problematic, thus the practice of transcribing them to microfilm. Even books wouldn't last as long as they do if it wasn't common practice to put them in long term storage. (i.e. A library shelf in a cool, dry place.)
In all reality, we're probably leaving far better records in the form of optical plastic disks than we are in newspaper. I just get a kick out of how many AOL CDs historians will have to sort through!
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Circulation (i.e., dead-tree distribution) is expensive and most pubs do it at a loss, or at best break-even, based on the full cover price. But ad revenue is much higher for print than on line. An ad in the paper is much more likely to reach the target, hence costs more and is more worth it. An on line ad may be exposed to more eyeballs, but they are filtered by the frontal cortex.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Here's the funny thing about that.
Go to a landfill. One that's been used for a while.
Dig down. Dig way down.
What will you find? Newspapers. Newspapers still folded up that were tossed in the trash. Newspapers that, on average, look no worse for wear than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago. Yes, 50 year old newspapers that are in fine condition. Maybe a few stains here or there, but not looking 50 years old, that's for sure.
So, for all the talk about properly storing these things, apparently storing them in a landfill is the least expensive of all.
subscribers are able to deduct the price from their taxes as a business expense
So? That doesn't make it free. It just offsets their income by a little bit, and they pay just a little bit less in taxes. It's still a net cost to the subscriber.
The reason people pay for it is because they find it directly (and often immediately - that day) useful to their business and investment decision making, and that pays back hugely in excess of the cost.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A good lesson for them to learn, though I would point out that the WSJ differential is 4, not 10. My guess is they wouldn't sell twice as many subscriptions at half the price. Still, that would put the price of an album on iTunes at $3-$4, not $10.
Even at that I'm not convinced that it would hold for the *AAs. The WSJ has a targeted, affluent market that would pay for convenience and timeliness. People don't share WSJ articles on P2P networks because not enough people want them, and those who do are more willing to pay for them. I'm sure there's a lot of cut-and-paste forwarding, and I wonder how much that cuts into sales. Perhaps some of those forwardees end up subscribing, because with news, timelineness is of the essense. P2P songs, on the other hand, will wait for a bit, and many of those downloads don't turn into album sales.
But we're discussing sales, not P2P, and the *AAs are already doing that in several venues, via iTunes and Real and Microsoft.
I do wonder about the numbers in the article. Are the costs of news gathering divided between the online and print editions? No matter what you do it still costs money to gather news and advertise your product. If the online sales get "free" content from the print division then their profitability numbers are dubious.
...is advertising. Subscriptions for most major print newspapers are usually about 25% of the revenue. 75% comes from the ads. Paper versions have to strike a fine balance: keeping prices at a point where they are maximizing subscribers, the number and demographics of whom their ad rates get set. Production and distribution costs for a print paper take an enormous toll on their profit margins. Market forces will eventually drive large newspapers to non-paper versions. It's just a matter of time.
Evil sig is livE.
Negative. Even if equipment existed to read that AOL cd in 20 years, let alone 200 years, it would be useless as corrosion makes them useless. You won't be able to read ANY cd that is 20 years old. Magnetic media is completely useless. tapes, disks, etc. must be turned on a regular basis to keep the earth's magnetic field from erasing them if they are stuck on a shelf in an archive. Even that is only a delay, the data must be rewritten eventually or it will be lost anyway. File formats are another challenge. with the exception of simple plain text documents, it will be nearly impossible to decode and make since of anything on that snazzy hard drive of yours. In 200 years, no one will be able to make since of a jpg or png, and these are well known and well understood formats. Data in proptiatary formats will be utterly useless in a much shorter time.
Even if equipment existed to read that AOL cd in 20 years, let alone 200 years,
You underestimate how clever people can be. Even if the equipment doesn't exist, I have little doubt that they'll figure out how the CDs work and build new equipment. From there they'll attempt a cryptographic analysis on the data to decode the ASCII character scheme. Once enough ASCII data is retrieved, they'll have enough information to tackle the binary data. So on and so forth. The retrieval won't get everything, but they will manage to recover a LOT of data.
it would be useless as corrosion makes them useless.
Nonsense. Corrosion makes a CD useless for regular purposes. It does NOT make the CD completely unreadable, nor does the entire surface disappear at once. Some of the data will survive on corroded CDs, and some CDs will probably avoid corrosion all together. Remember that pressed CDs (especially the earlier CDs in the 90's) hold together far better than their burnable counterparts.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Though just like with music, that won't make it any cheaper for the WSJ to actually gather and edit what it is they sell. So the lesson should be the other way around: the WSJ should be watching how quickly a popular bit-based info-product can get turned into a pirated, not-payed-for file that's passed around between thousands or millions of anonymous "friends."
Obviously people have been e-mailing snippets of paid-for WJS online content to their business friends since the day they went online. Because of the half-life of the information, that probably did a lot to encourage new subscribers. But in the sense that people can use back-issues of WSJ for research, they're probably spending a lot of time thinking of how to keep their intellectual output paid for. I suppose the good news for them is that it's (so far) mostly text, and it's real easy for bots to find that stuff infringed-upon on blogs, rss feeds, etc. But the more that their business depends upon the online model, the more they're going to have to be ready to play hardball if everyone in Hong Kong is boning up for the next day-trading cycle on a free "shared feed" of what hundreds of expensive Dow Jones employees just spent the last 24 hours laboriously putting together.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.