zlacker

"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage"

Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc.

Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.

>>tyingq+(OP)
Your overall point still stands but the $4 you cite is a sign-up promotion - after that expires, it's $17/month for a digital subscription.

>>tyingq+(OP)
NYT is $4/4 weeks (not per month) during its trial period. That plan jumps to ~$18/mo after that ($17 per 4 weeks => ~$18/mo). WaPo is similar.

The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.

>>tyingq+(OP)
Although the comparison to NYT/WaPo makes some superficial sense, there is a big difference between a newspaper and a news agency like Reuters or AP.

I don’t know much about the journalism business, but I expect Reuters is catering towards a smaller, premium audience that reads a lot of straight news but doesn’t care so much about criticism, commentary, and so on. In particular: reporters and academics, for whom this will be a business expense.

>>tyingq+(OP)
Yeah, somebody really needs to solve the micropayments problem for real. I have no problem paying for content, but there is no way in hell I'm paying $35 a month for a Reuters subscription just to read one or two articles a month. And same for NYT, WSJ, yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean... if we all paid for monthly subscriptions for every news site we read a couple of articles a month from, we'd be paying $600 / month just for news. I think that merits a "C'mon, man" response.

If nothing else maybe these sites could have plans that are tiered somehow, instead of going from "5 free a month (but you have to register and give us your info)" straight to "35.00 a month for unlimited." Give us "$3.00 a month for 10 articles, or $8.00 a month for 20 articles" tiered plan options or something.

>>runako+M1
I'm surprised they would be competitors. My (perhaps incorrect) assumption is that Bloomberg would have much more in-depth business coverage.

And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.

>>tyingq+(OP)
FT is even worse; $50-$100 per month for individual subscribers, depending on which package you have and whether you catch a promotion.

I agree with the other poster who suggested Reuters is targeting pros with this pricing.

>>mindcr+76
Why not just offer a preview (headline and first paragraph) and pay a small fee per article; maybe something like a quarter? They could also include an unlimited tier for avid readers. A decade ago this model would probably be a non-starter because it would require the inconvenience of maintaining an account everywhere and going through an awkward checkout flow for every transaction. SSO payment providers make this a lot easier now. Anecdotally, Apple Pay is a joy to use, for example.

>>mindcr+76
Micropayments are the way to go. But as the intermediate solution, I would be in favor of (non-expiring) credit-based microtransactions. E.g. you buy $20 of NYT credit. After that, it is $.25 for a single article <3y old, $1 for any number of today's articles, $3 for any number of articles from the past 7 days, $10 for full access for the following 30 days.

I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!

It's all gain for the sellers. But from the customer's perspective, one still has to give their credit card number, and may still end up paying for content they won't use.

>>CSSer+Te
That is the micropayments problem. You have to make it easy enough, like taking a quarter out of your pocket, for people to actually do it. And low enough fee where it's worth it. I believe most micro transaction providers still charge at least a flat 10c fee, which is a hefty portion of any micropayment.

>>m000+mg
I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!

That's a fair point. And I definitely favor a real micropayments option in the long-run. But I could settle for a tiered plan in some cases as an interim step, especially if the only other option is the "unlimited plan" which just doesn't (in most cases) make sense for my usage patterns.

>>mindcr+76
Micropayments have a 50 year history of consistently and precisely perfectly failing to work.

The grail you seek is not the holy sort.

>>Apollo+nq
So why not pass that along to the consumer? If we were talking about a quarter an article before, now it's thirty five cents. I'd still pay it. My point was that the technology seems good enough now. I'll admit I could be way off on the price for it to be economically feasible, but I'm still very curious what that is. Based on what I read, see and hear, many of us have "subscription fatigue".

>>runako+M1
NYT is $4/4 weeks as long as you continue to call and pretend to cancel at the end of your trial periods. It's a pain in the ass, but it work every time.