I Pay More for Digital, Because It’s Worth More
Walking over to the Hilton Hotel for the 2005 Online News Association conference in New York today, I grabbed my copies of free tabloids “AM New York” and “metro.” It occurred to me that I pay more for my digital media than print.
And that makes sense: The online versions are worth more – I can see today’s and yesterday’s and weeks-ago news, search headlines or words, email to a friend, easily save stories with a few clicks, sort things into folders, and all without having to stuff a file drawer or two or three. Some sites let me use their functionality to sift and sort and get feeds of what I want, or check how a company’s stock price has moved in relation to a story. I can see what people are commenting about related to a story, and set up or access a tag cloud to see what’s going on in the blog-sphere. I can get RSS feeds of many of the subject areas I’m interested in, including for paid products. In print, I can’t do very much of that at all.
So here’s a rough version of the financials of it: I pay $99 per year for The Wall Street Journal online, about $15 for Avantgo, I get subscriptions to Factiva and Thomson and Reuters through business school (which I have paid for if you count the $60,000 exec MBA tuition). I get access to Time-Warner publications for my family’s $15 or so monthly AOL subscription, and a few things (including WSJ.com ) through T-Mobile Hotspots and a few others through Verizon’s DSL service. In print, I pay for the weekend New York Times, in part because the coupons in there repay that price of about $19/month, and a couple of magazine subscriptions at between $5 and $20/year. One of those magazines, Business2.0, I paid for just to get full access online (though maybe I could’ve achieved the same thing through AOL).
I almost never buy a single copy of a newspaper or magazine, except maybe 25 or 50 cents for a tabloid or when I’m at an airport.
That’s a long, maybe boring, and incomplete litany, but the basic message is that I pay for digital, and not as much for print. I also could desperately use a consolidator, someone who would come to me and say “You can have it all for $25 or $50 or $75 per month.” Or even some way of charging me on a per-use basis.
Regardless: Isn’t media in a digital format to you, the user, worth more than in ink-on-paper format?
Well said. A perfect anecdote on why the newspaper industry is suffering. But here’s a question: If we vote with our pocketbooks and the print media continue to downsize, I think we’ve all lost. It’s the print industry that feeds all the things you mentioned. Factiva, wsj.com, etc. When do we get to a point where most media is digital and that industry becomes self-sustaining?
Comment by Glenn Fannick — November 7, 2005 @ 7:12 pm