Subscription price: $1.96;Newsstand price: $6.99;
*Change in circulation: +8.3%
Subscription price: 47¢;Newsstand price: $4.95;
*Change in circulation: –13%
*From 2007 to 2008*Change in circulation: –13%
In Switch, Magazines Think About Raising Prices: In the last six months of 2008, subscribers paid an average of 47 cents an issue for Newsweek, 77 cents an issue for BusinessWeek and 89 cents an issue for Fortune, according to an analysis of their filings with the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Even Condé Nast’s magazines, filled with luxury ads and dispatches from far-flung locations, are cheap: 87 cents an issue for The New Yorker, 89 cents for Allure and just over a dollar each for Condé Nast Traveler and Bon Appétit. [...]
Most major magazines have cut prices recently as part of an effort to increase subscriptions. A New York Times analysis of circulation data for the 50 largest and most expensive magazines showed that in the last four years, as overall prices rose 14 percent, subscription prices dropped an average of 9 percent.
(Lower subscription prices do not necessarily mean less revenue for the publisher, however. When publishers reduce their reliance on subscriptions sold through agents, the subscription prices can fall, but the publisher earns more because it is no longer sharing the subscription revenue.) [...]
The Economist is leading the charge on expensive subscriptions, and its success is one reason publishers are rethinking their approaches. It is a news magazine with an extraordinarily high cover price — raised to $6.99 late last year — and subscription price, about $100 a year on average.
Even though The Economist is relatively expensive, its circulation has increased sharply in the last four years. Subscriptions are up 60 percent since 2004, and newsstand sales have risen 50 percent, according to the audit bureau.
“We get more money out of our readers than advertisers, and that’s a very different model,” said Alan Press, senior vice president for marketing in the Americas at the Economist Group. “We’ll never discount the kind of content we have.”
