Subscription cards from four of the magazines I receive: Sunset, Smithsonian, Triathlete and Make, all priced around $30/year.
Magazines have a serious dilemma in pricing subscriptions:
- What’s the maximum price readers will pay? (Or, how much is this magazine experience worth to them?)
- What’s the minimum price that will generate profit, or supplement advertising revenue adequately to add up to a profit?
- What’s the minimum price that still communicates that the product is quality and has value?
An interesting post recently at Ad Age suggests that, although low prices might appeal to readers, magazines that cut their subscription rates may not gain subscribers; they might even lose them.
As magazines have lost circulation dramatically of late, subscription revenue will likely become increasingly important to replace declining ad revenue. However, readers are slicing away unnecessary expenses themselves – with magazine and newspaper subscriptions likely among the casualties.
I’m certainly a magazine enthusiast, and when I find a subscription card offering me a magazine for $1 an issue, that $12 per year for a fresh magazine experience is pretty tempting.
What I’ve noticed, though, is that – as the Ad Age piece calls it – I often become part of the “marginal readership” of the magazine if I take the plunge and buy the cheap subscription. I haven’t invested enough to feel motivated to take the time to read the magazine unless it turns out to be quite appealing.
When I have spent a lot of money (for me) on a subscription, as with The New Yorker, I’ve felt serious guilt over not being able to read every issue faithfully. I feel like I’ve let down my “pledge” to become a reader and am disappointed in myself and my failure to follow through on my spending. (Yes, I tend to be hard on myself; can you tell?) So, the greater the subscription expense, the greater my desire to fully invest myself in that magazine experience. The expense isn’t the only determinant of my reading enthusiasm, of course, but it is a factor.
This phenomenon is one reason why I’d argue that many magazines should charge more for their content. I think readers “buy into” a magazine’s uniquely constructed experience and offerings, and want to become part of its community through reading. Undervaluing that experience by putting a small price tag on it also undermines the sense of worth that readers ascribe to their participation with the magazine – and, as side effects, could diminish their loyalty as subscribers and their attention to advertising messages within the magazine.
In these times, magazines need to do everything possible to maintain their existing subscribers and attract new ones. Counterintuitively, the best way to do that might be to keep subscription prices at current levels or raise them slightly.
Of course, I’d also be willing to spend more on magazines to fund better content and to liberate magazines from the many editorial constraints they experience as a result of their reliance on advertising. I’d also like customizable magazines and other innovations. And, of course, it would be great to see magazines on iPads that are awesomely designed. I’ve written about all those things here. And if publishers want to have the funding to make those things happen, they need to communicate to the audience that their monetary investment is necessary to continue the creation of terrific magazine products.
My one nagging question, though, is whether it’s fair to raise subscription prices and inevitably price some readers out of the opportunity to participate in magazine readership. Would raising prices create a certain elitism around magazine subscriptions? (Maybe that already exists?)
Perhaps the growing field of print-on-demand magazines, along with the digitizing of magazines, eventually will lead to such efficiency in the publishing and distribution process that prices will adjust accordingly and remain accessible to a variety of readers. It may be that as these new approaches develop, the act of subscribing to a magazine will look so different that these concerns are no longer relevant.
