"why would anyone pay a full subscription to end up reading just 20% of personally relevant material? As I observed the mountains of weekly and monthly magazines read less than half way, accumulating on my desk I decided there was no reason at all."
I love reading, especially good magazines such as The Economist, Time and Inc. In fact, these are probably the only three paper magazines that I have been a subscriber of in my 20-something years of existence, not completely outside the norm for someone in my generation, used to reading online via RSS feed readers and now Twitter.
Everything else, blogs, NY Times, ENDI (Puerto Rico’s main newspaper), The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post as well as a variety of business publications, I simply access online, making the need to pay for premium content almost obsolete. So obsolete I should add that I recently cancelled all my paper subscriptions in a calculated austerity plan that I can only describe as Hellenic. However, the move to cancel was not just about the money or meager savings from subscriptions, but due to something more important, touching the core of the publishing industry's main challenge these days: relevance.
Whether in an online or offline magazine, I (and I suspects most regular readers) only read about 20%-70% of the available content. Given limited time, we tend to gravitate towards certain sections that we know we will find relevant (last hour, tech, business, education and internationals for example) and simply browse through the headlines of other articles in case there happens to be a golden nugget. Otherwise, we skip to something else. Given this assumption, one has to ask in these days of limited budgets and abundant supply of free online content, why would anyone pay a full subscription to end up reading just 20% of personally relevant material? As I observed the mountains of weekly and monthly magazines read less than half way, accumulating on my desk I decided there was no reason at all.
My ideal magazine would therefore be comprised of only the sections I care about from each one of the magazines I read regularly. In other words, I would like to have one customized packet with my top 20% stories or preferred sections from each one. Why can’t I? The simple answer is that magazine production and supply chain costs have historically been too high to accommodate customization. Bundling, as defined in economic theory has been a better profit maximization strategy for the brick and mortar publishing business, even if it encourages the consumption content we are not particularly interested in for the sake of reading those articles and columns we actually care about.
That is all understandable for the written paper sellers. Now, it is difficult for me to understand the following: if the Internet provides so many tools for content consumption and customization of the reading/viewing experience, why hasn’t the publishing industry adjusted its revenue model for premium content so that it better matches this new reality of customer behavior? Why, in the face of such fascinating new technology like e-readers (Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc.) that are free from old supply chain restrictions, can’t we move to a pay-per-article or pay-per-section model? There are numerous benefits I could see in such a model if developed correctly (using mobile plan-like pricing) by an experienced media player, but I will go into those in a different post.
If the raise of the mobile application market has taught us anything is that users are willing to pay for smaller yet very personalized chunks of valuable information provided at the right time. As online content grows to overwhelming proportions, it would be nice if someone tried this out in the premium market, if for no other crazy reason, to let readers read just what they want, when they want it.
