The Wall Street Journal is running a piece on itself, quoting “a person familiar with the matter” who says that The WSJ plans to charge subscribers $17.99 per month for iPad subscriptions. That’s not a bad price, since the print version of the WSJ costs about $29 per month. But is it in line with what people want to pay for the content digitally?
Magazines are apparently ready to offer weekly or monthly editions from the start, not annual subscriptions. According to sources, the April issue of Esquire magazine will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for only $2.99, which is $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos to show off the device’s multimedia. Then there’s a full iPad issue of Men’s Health that matches the $4.99 regular price.
It will be interesting to see what happens with pricing and how they experiment with it.
[WSJ]
TAGS:
iPad, wall street journal, WSJ
I thought a subscription was suppose to save you money. A year print subscription to The Journal is $119. So where does $18 a month come in to play. Give me a break. Seems to me that if you don’t have to use paper then that should defer some of the cost. Oh well lets just all continue to cut down more trees!
What’s the point?
An online subscription to WSJ is also $119 (and a print subscription is normally much higher–the previous poster must get a discounted rate). I can access my online subscription using Safari on the iPad, so why pay $18/month to view the exact same information on the native app.
WSJ did the same thing with their iPhone app. At first, the iPhone App was free for print or online subscribers, but a few months ago they added separate pricing, even to existing subscribers that prices iPhone App access at about $78/year. The iPhone app never offered the same level of access as the online subscription, so I just deleted it and now exclusively use the web.
This is ridiculous, how much more do these providers need to profit before they are satisfied? Online digital copies should not run more than a dollar or two. That’s what digital content is, a cheap and reliable alternative to an hard copy, this is what book publishers and the like fail to understand.