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About once every 12.6 days or so, we receive a nasty comment (usually on Twitter) from someone outraged at the cost of subscribing to some of our international magazines. Even before reading, we know with a scientific 99.54% level of accuracy which title(s) they’re referring to.
Most often it’s The New Yorker or maybe Sports Illustrated but sometimes also Hello! and the NME. What do these titles have in common? Apart from the fact that they’re some of they world’s most popular toilet reads, they are also all air-freighted weekly international titles.
This means that each issue is printed, plucked off the newstands of London or New York, shipped to us, processed, stuffed into an envelope and then posted out to you. Multiply all of the above by anywhere between 47 to 52 times (depending on the title) over the course of a year and the result is that these are not cheap subscriptions!
A 12-month subscription to The New Yorker from us costs $681.50, Sports Illustrated costs $563.55 and the NME costs $663.13. Shelling out five or six hundred clams for a magazine subscription isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time—particularly not when some of these titles are available directly from the publisher at a fraction of the price that we offer them for.
Why is the case?
Well, it’s a bit long winded but here goes:
In America in particular, the publishing business works in a slightly different way to how it does here in Australasia. Because of the vast size of their market, stateside publishers generally don’t seek to make money on the cover price (which in some cases is the sole source of revenue for a number of Aussie and Kiwi mags) so much as they do by selling advertising.
Each subscriber offers detailed demographic data (age, income, location, spending habits, etc.) in exchange for a hefty discount on the cover price. The publishers use this data to sell more highly targeted advertising which in turn means that advertising space can then be sold at a premium. In this way, subscribers form the backbone of their business model.
Since more subscribers results in higher circulation figures and a more rich and detailed demographic breakdown, the magazines then want to get as many subscribers as possible… even if they barely break even on the printing and postage costs from the subscription fees alone.
In fact, the amount that they charge is in fact only a token figure—it simply needs to be high enough to indicate to the advertiser that the reader cares enough about the contents of the magazine that they’re actually going to read it and not just throw it in the bin. In short, the cost of a subscription needs to be enough to differentiate the magazine from junk mail. Thus, a one year sub to US Vogue costs a mere $USD15.00 and Sports Illustrated is just $USD0.81 an issue! You can barely post a letter for that much.
By contrast, our prices are determined by a pretty simple—if far less competitive—formula:
Amount of issues x cover price + cost of postage – a small discount. That’s why they’re awkward figures like “$581.21″ rather than the infinitely more slick “$599.99″ with a free set of steak knives like we’d offer if we were actually making tons of money on them!
We’re not trying to rip anyone off; these prices are simply a reflection of our costs in order to sell you a subscription. We’d love to be able to sell a 12 month New Yorker subscription for $120 USD (the equivalent of around $2.40 an issue) but our wholesale costs as well as the price of postage mean that this simply isn’t possible.
So, why do we continue to offer these subscriptions up for sale when they’re priced so uncompetitively?
A big part of the reason is that the vast majority of the international magazines that we offer subscriptions to don’t care enough about the Australian and New Zealand market to bother with all the hassles of international postage. Which is to say, they just won’t sell you a subscription at all.
We also offer a slightly different and, we’d like to think, superior service. If you subscribe to the New Yorker through us you’ll get air-freighted copies—your magazine should arrive about fourteen days after it hits the shelf in the US—rather than the one or two month old sea freight copies you’ll get from the magazine directly.
If an issue is missing/late/damaged in transit, you can drop us an e-mail or call us on our 1800 number and we’ll happily send you out a replacement copy. (And if you think that service is overrated, then you’ve never woken up in the middle of the night to spend 30 minutes on hold waiting to speak to the nasal and disinterested employees of the mailing houses used by big US publishers. Trust us, we have.)
So, that’s why we keep selling subscriptions to magazines like The New Yorker… even if we do look a bit like rip-off merchants in the process.