WSJ iPad Pricing Model Is Bad News
Mar 29th, 2010 | 7 responses
AFP reports that the Wall Street Journal plans to charge $17.99 a month ($216/year) for an iPad subscription. This pricing model is hard to explain, given other WSJ subscription plans. And I worry that such extreme subscription plans could cloud the iPad debut and doom product adoption.
What are the various pricing schemes for the Wall Street Journal?
- ~$20 a month for WSJ newspaper ($249/12 months via Amazon)
- ~$18 a month for WSJ newspaper + online ($2.99/week, annual subscription)
- $17.99 a month for the iPad (per the AFP article)
- $14.99 a month for Kindle (per the AFP article)
- ~$11 a month for WSJ newspaper + online ($2.69/week, introductory pricing, annual subscription)
- ~$10 a month for WSJ newspaper (print, $2.29/week, introductory pricing, annual subscription)
- ~$10 a month for WSJ newspaper (print, $2.29/week, annual subscription)
- ~$8 a month on the iPhone, iPodTouch and BlackBerry ($2/week)
- ~$8 a month for online-only ($1.99/week, introductory pricing, annual subscription)
- ~$8 a month for online-only ($1.99/week, annual subscription)
An electronic version of any publication should not cost more than its printed version due to the almost-zero per unit distribution cost associated with the electronic version. Period.
The iPad is more like a small computer than a phone in its reading area. As such, it should not require device-dependent applications to access Internet content: this balkanization of the Internet is not a GoodThing. Computer software/hardware balkanization was the impetus for Sir Tim Berners-Lee to develop hypertext protocol and the web in the first place!
News isn’t like a song: we don’t read a story over and over again. The iTunes model isn’t going to salvage the news media’s business model, the one where they’ve reaped monopoly rents for decades.
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7 Responses to “WSJ iPad Pricing Model Is Bad News”
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iPad will survive high prices from certain publishers. This sounds like a WSJ problem to me.
Number of people who will find free news sources online: hundreds of thousands
Number of people who will cough up 20 bucks a month for a newspaper they don't already read (how many do you know read the WSJ right now?): as close to zero as you will get
And if you're right about the costs of getting published online – “An electronic version of any publication should not cost more than its printed version due to the almost-zero per unit distribution cost associated with the electronic version” – then this could be viewed as price fixing, shouldn't it? Some kind of fraud, fake profits, something like that?
I wonder if Apple or Amazon are going to file a lawsuit if enough device owners complain about it.
[...] WSJ iPad Pricing Model Is Bad News (themoderatevoice.com) [...]
Why complain about it, just dont buy it, eventually WSJ will realize they have tons of lost sales. As far as reading WSJ, im not a big fan but i do find myself looking at it quite often, usually not because i sought it out but because referring links to it. perhaps free or reasonably priced i might subscribe but not at 17.99.
[...] But when newspaper and magazine subscription fees were announced, many issued a collective groan. The Moderate Voice breaks down the $17.99 per month fee to read The Wall Street Journal and concludes the pricing [...]