Friday, April 8, 2011

New York Times - an expensive empty page

Maybe you are considering to pay $20 a month to have the NYT on your iPad or you did already pay for it.
Either way what does it take to justify such big monthly amount.

When you buy a newspaper at the newsstand, you know there is a complex distribution behind and the result you hold in your hand is printed on paper. You get what you pay. You know it might be a lot of money but you understand there are costs for distribution and printing. And if you want, you only need to buy the issue you want to read.

But in the digital world everything is different. There is no distribution costs besides a share to Apple (in case of the iPad) and no costs for print material.







Therefore it should be cheaper to read news on the iPad than buying a printed version. But it is not. For some reason NYT believes it should cost the same. Maybe they don't want that people move digital, because they might get much better ad prices in print. If this the reason than NYT should hire smart yield managers and sales people for digital ads, rethinking their online ad model. Online can give NYT much better statistics and if there is online in the ad a spelling error it can be fixed in minutes. A printed newspaper with a wrong ad is out of luck as soon it is distributed.

But instead we have to pay same price and are even not able to buy just on the go for the issues we want to read.

But the really frustrating part is, that when I open the NYT app, I never know if is working or not.
NYT crashes several times and since they switched to the paid model, some articles (10%) are showing up empty. I can't remember when I bought a printed newspaper and when I opened it, the pages were empty. And even so I could bring it back and get my money back or could exchange it.

Sorry, but this does not work online.

Are we today so used to not working programs that we don't care to pay and to get bad results?

Only because a lot software get released on a PC in a state which is far away from working well just to get faster the development cost back, does not justify the same on smart phones or tablets.

We consumers should fight for quality.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

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