A Friend of The Audit passed us an email he got from The New York Times offering a package deal of a Kindle DX, a Kindle subscription to the Times. To seal the deal, the Times helpfully throws in an NYT Kindle cover, sort of like the old SI football-telephone enticement.
What’s interesting about this is that essentially it means if you buy the $499 Kindle DX you get the Times for free for a year. Presumably Amazon is partially subsidizing this deal, which the email implies is only for former print subscribers.
But it also probably means the Times is foregoing part of the already-low revenue it gets from Kindle subscriptions in a bid to lock in readers to the product long-term.
Who knows if it will work. Even if it does, it’s not going to save the newspaper, as I wrote here. Not when papers only get about a third of the revenue from a normal Kindle subscription.
But, hey, it’s better than nothing.
It may be true that newspapers are only getting about a third of the revenue they would normaly get from print but they hardly have any overhead at all that comes with printing, shipping, storage, equiptment, employees, billing, and marketing because amazon does it all for them. Not to mention widening their coustomer base and brining in new readers. Not going to save the news paper? They could
#1 Posted by Jason, CJR on Fri 2 Oct 2009 at 06:40 PM