I currently pay $2.99 a month for access to the The New Yorker on my Kindle. It’s actually a great way to read the magazine’s almost entirely text-driven content. And it’s probably an improvement on print when you consider how hard copies of the New Yorker tend to pile up. With the Kindle subscription, you always have a bunch of them with you and the content tends to stay fresh over time. All said, the Kindle version is handy and priced correctly.
But recently I’d been wondering whether I’d be willing to pay a separate fee when I buy an iPad later this year. Happily, that’s not a decision I’ll have to make.
You wouldn’t expect the The New Yorker, whose move to the web been a bit like one of its articles — long, slow, with plenty of twists and turns — to be a trailblazer on anything digital. Yet Editor David Remnick’s announcement this week that it’s offering one pricing option across all platforms except print is a welcome bit of news.
With the proliferation of platforms, the question of how to charge for each new iteration is a major question for content brands. Publishers should feel comfortable in charging but they need to exhibit good sense in deciding how they’ll charge as they take their readers from plaform to platform.
And as both a content provider and consumer it’s a particularly complicated issue for me. I’ve recently been seething a bit about MLB.TV’s pricing options. I cough up $110 a year largely so I can watch Philadelphia Phillies games from my home in New York.That’s fairly steep, but worth it. MLB.TV delivers what I want in an amazing online video experience. Less worth it was the cost of the mobile audio on my Blackberry. $2.99 a month for radio broadcasts. And, when I do it buy my iPad, it’ll cost $15 for the MLB app.
While the businessman in me gives MLB credit for monetizing its content, the fan in me finds it insulting. OK, MLB, charge me $110 for a strong product, but don’t nickle and dime me up to $140. This sort of gouging may mean that I one day ditch the service and seek out a bootleg livestream when I need a Phillies phix.
The New Yorker is smart not to put its loyal subscibers in that predicament. Now it just needs to find some way to bring The New Yorker’s, um, not-so-imagistic pages to the iPad later this year.
