Friday, August 01, 2008
Certainty of income
Sorry to sound so wise-after-the-fact, but it’s always amazed me how so few publishers of weekly products don’t try harder to convert more readers to subscribers.
Sometimes I understand it’s about subscribers being less profitable than newsstand buyers, but it depends how much you have to discount subscriptions to attract them. Oh and if you can get the product to them in time for it not to be stale — no good for overnight things like daily or Sunday papers.
Given the structural trend to falling circulations and falling readership in newspapers, surely the thing is swinging in favour of the certainty of income subscriptions offer – some kind of stability in a falling market. If you can tie subscribers into longer deals you can slow the decline, or at least the frequency of the steps and milk that cash cow while it’s still producing.
