Every night, our presses churn through three or four tons of newsprint and our carriers drive almost 4,000 miles up and down central New Hampshire roads to get the news out to our readers. And we’re a relatively small paper (about 18K), albeit in a fairly rural area.
Wouldn’t it be great to replace all that gas and newsprint consumption with electronic delivery?
In his column today at Poynter.org, Bill Mitchell considers whether newspapers could subsidize iPads for readers who sign on for, say, a two-year subscription.
It’s not a crazy notion. Mitchell calculates the average annual cost of acquiring and servicing a print subscriber at more than $450 and the average annual revenue per subscriber at $400. I’d say his costs are on the high side (more than double our per-subscriber production and distribution costs, including acquisition, and our per-reader costs would be even lower), but the basic point remains that it’s an expensive proposition.
There are three cautions, though, two of which Mitchell alludes to.
The first, as Mitchell acknowledges, is that a lot of your production and even distribution costs are fixed. Losing a few print subscribers on a route doesn’t necessarily shorten the drive, and you still have to fire up that big iron as long as you intend to serve traditional print readers. The marginal savings from gradually shifting a people to electronic delivery aren’t that great.
The second issue Mitchell mentions is that you need to have an electronic product that’s effective for advertisers. That’s key. Today, online screen presentation is nowhere near as powerful as print, even on full-size monitors. Behavioral and contextual advertising technologies may ultimately narrow the performance gap, but there’s still a ways to go. Will there be some magic in the iPad experience that encourages more engagement with the advertising? Perhaps. Tappable video should help.
A third issue I would raise is that online readership habits are very different, and the typical online reader is much less engaged with the publication. We see it in our site logs, where an average visit may last five to seven minutes. (Confession: Our stats break down across our subdomains, so that number’s rough.) In print, though, we know from years of readership studies that the average reader typically spends more than 20 minutes with a day’s paper.
That’s a huge difference in engagement, with real implications not only for advertisers but also for building a lasting habit of readership. So here’s the crux question: Will iPad readers be more like Web readers or print readers?
To some extent, the iPad may capture more of the print readership experience. After all, it looks like newspapers (and readers) will still be able to take advantage of all the subtleties of good page design, so much of which is lost in the flattened, data-focused world of typical websites. There could be more room for serendipitous discoveries, as readers are nudged toward interesting items through the language of typography and layout. I expect a great tactile experience form the iPad, and that should make reading on it fun. Plus, you’ll have options for video and interactivity.
But if readers skim iPad papers the way they skim our sites, we may be giving up more in ad effectiveness and long-term reader engagement than we save on gas and paper.
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