I was thinking of subscribing to Wired and the above is their offer (US residents) - US$10 for 12 issues and they give you a T-shirt as well. GQ had a similar priced offer (below).
I know that times are bad for publishers but when magazines with good quality content, like Wired are virtually having to give their product away (I'm sure $10 wouldn't even cover their p&p costs) and most magazines circulations and readerships are still falling at the same time, do people really value them anymore?
The magazines are obviously existing on the ad revenue alone which seems like a very, very risky model because when you're clearly this desperate for readers, it's hardly a convincing story for those advertisers to give bukets of cash in return for a few pages of ads next to more ads.
I think the big publishing groups need to seriously innovate and should be looking to aggregate their content and make it simple for people to build custom published magazines which pick out only the specific content they are interested in from the whole portfolio of titles. I think many pwople would pay for this as long as the content was good and you could select to do it either with or without ads or possibly set an advertising / content threshold.
We're hoping to get an experiment like this off the ground soon with one of our clients. Hoping to...
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I like the idea of custom magazines but I don't think people would be willing to pay a premium to not have adverts in a magazine like they might for a music streaming service. Are ads in magazines really something that makes the experience that much worse? It's much less intrusive than TV advertising as you don't have to wait for the ad to finish - it either interests you and you look or you don't. Though if there were more adverts than content that could get annoying!
ReplyDeleteTalking about all the magazine offers going on at the moment - I just got a years subscription to NewMediaAge for less than a £1 an issue when the cover price is £3.50 so I'm pretty chuffed with that. A key factor in my decision was that you also get access to articles on the website that are only available to subscribers. I'm not sure I would have just paid to access those articles though so it's worked quite well as a way to introduce me to paying in an indirect way for content on the site. Which could then possibly lead me to just paying for content on the site in a years time when my subscription runs out if I feel the walled off content is worth it. It's changed my attitude towards paying for online content by changing my behaviour (me now reading online content that i have effectively paid for). I think this strategy could be a good way for publishers to tackle monetising their sites but with dwindling print readership they've missed the opportune time to do it. I went off on a bit of a tangent there but at least it was about magazines!