WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?
By Thomas Ricker 
posted March 25th 2010 4:15AM
posted March 25th 2010 4:15AM
Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst's Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase "somewhere in Mississippi," oddly enough) to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men's Health with match the glossy's $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.
Unless they do something different than conventional newspapers this wont be attracting much people since you still need to buy the device...
Something like wired magazine is great, but just a normal newspaper with 0 interaction is pretty lame... You gotta be a tree huger to prefer this option.
@Mr w00t Discount is one thing, less of a commitment is another. Enough for some, not enough for others. I wouldn't be surprised if a publication like the NY Times tried to get customers a subsidized price if they get a 1 or 2 year subscription, time will tell.
Charge whatever, I'll pass. I barley have enough time to read what news gets leaked out early on the web as it is, for FREE I might add.
@Mr w00t
yea true, However, I'm loving the iPad because right now, pirating books it a total hassle. You can almost never find what you want. After this thing comes out and someone cracks the DRM, it's gonna be AMAZING.
@Brent1700
but you still have to cry till your eyes bleed to read a book or a newspaper for more than an hour.
@Atkins hmm it depends dude...
i my self have no problem in reading a pdf for hours on my pc (i do it every day) but it is a no brainer that the kindle is more "eye friendly" than some lcd screen..
@Brent1700 Exactly. A jailbroken ebook reader with free access to the entire world of digital magazines, newspapers that can be downloaded in seconds as they will be very small compared to video. Subscriptions my ass. You already pay $500 at least for the thing + whatever data subscriptions. No way is content going on top of that - nearly $20 every month for one publication just to hear Mosspuppet's ramblings. Computers pay for themselves because of the content we get for free. Subsidize it with advertising I can ignore.
@Mr w00t
The trouble is that right now you can get a WSJ subscription for online content only for half the price... Essentially, just by using the iPad you are paying twice as much for almost the same experience.
Also, any word on things like educational discounts? That would be nice!
@TinWard
Not sure if you have a job. Doubtful. But let's go with this. Have a word with your boss ( or is it team leader?), tell him they should I've all their burgers away for free, and plaster the place with advertising instead. They should be able to cover their overheads, and the massive increase in custom should help him get better rates, and pay his staff more. By my estimation, you should be in for a pay increase approaching 50%. Sounds good, eh?
Let me get this right:
$17.99/month for iPad WSJ subscription
-or-
$1.99/week (roughly $8.50/month) for the normal WSJ online subscription which I can use on ANY internet connected device, including the web browser on the iPad
I can understand a desire for iPad-formatted content, but they are asking an almost 100% premium over the normal online-only subscription.
@Brent1700
It was a long time ago but I still remember feeling that sharp pain every time I saw the prices of textbooks while I was in university. I bet prices are even worse now. With the cost of education and books increasing, I think students will love the idea of pirating digital textbooks so they can afford to umm... I don't know, feed themselves~
I used to really respect professors who went out of their way to assign affordable textbooks for their classes.
@pukerocket Good job at telling a story to a pirate who doesn't care.
I'd argue that a lot of people pirate things because they don't agree with the price. Is that morally OK? I don't know. But 20 bucks a month for a god damn newspaper subscription? Who even reads a newspaper when they have an RSS feeder?
$20 is:
Tank of gas
Food for four days
2 movies
month of wow
a third of my phone bill
75% of my broadband cost
So many things I could be paying for instead of an "ipad formatted" newspaper. People buy things that are worth the monet.
@Brent1700
Brent the Ipad from what i had read in the web is going to be Epub(meaning DRM free) heres a quote from Andy Ihnatko of the chicago sun time
"2) iBooks will read any ePub-formatted ebook, not just commercial content purchased from Apple's iBookstore.
It's stated in this passage from the page about iBooks:
The iBooks app uses the ePub format — the most popular open book format in the world. That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of your favorite reads. And you can add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.
Of course, this could mean many different things. It seems to say that you can add any arbitrary ePub-formatted eBook to your iBook library. I doubt that this also means you can include any DRM'ed content (like the ubiquitous "ePub wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM" found on other e-bookstores.
But this is a huge win for iBooks and the iPad. Building your own ePub-formatted ebooks is simple, and it immediately opens the iPad to hundreds of thousands of free titles available for the downloading. It's a particularly swift blow against the Amazon Kindle, which as yet has no ePub support. ePub is indeed the most popular open book format available and in the year 2010, any ebook reader that wants to be taken seriously is going to have to support it natively."
@sweetelectro How the hell does your phone bill cost more than double your broadband bill? You're either getting screwed on your phone or getting an amazing deal on broadband (or you consider dial-up broadband). Vonage is $20 a month and magicjack is $20 a year.
@Mr w00t I agree, what these content user need to realize is that the content in electronic format, especially in a proprietary format like this, is NOT AS VALUABLE to people as is the hard copy. It is far more ephemeral, and people tend to look at it as an add-on charge to something that they already paid a lot of money for. They seem to act like electronic content is some how premium, which is especially stupid in that it is a medium that has a large amount of free content available.
Where is the WSJ pricing coming from? I went to WSJ.com and it is $2.69/wk for print+online = $10.76/mo. I fail to see how the iPad pricing is better. I really should buy some AAPL, with these prices and iFans gobbling it up, the stock price should hit $400 easily.
@Mr w00t
People who subscribe to several magazines yet who wind up with dozens of linear feet of several years of past issues will appreciate even the most basic digital version as long as its easy to use and is searchable so you can fine past articles. Food magazines come to mind. If they can advance on that I say all the better.
@Mr w00t ... That's like saying you need an iPod to play your CD's... ahem!
@Mr w00t
Or you might just be a busy professional who needs the best information possible at your fingertips and who doesn’t have time to scour the internet 24/7 to cobble together their news just to save a few bucks. Time is a luxury that many professionals don;t have. But they do have money so they will gladly pay someone else to bring the news to them in a concise and easy to understand way.
The WSJ never was and never will be meant to appeal to the Engadget forum posting demographic so its not surprising that many people here don't get the appeal. I don't need a subscription to the WSJ but i understand its appeal. There are magazines and professional journals I will gladly pay to have delivered to my iPad.
@sweetelectro
I'd argue that 95% of people don't care about the price - they'd pirate if it was 50 cents.
@Mr w00t ANYTIME APPLE GETS INVOLVED IN ANYTHING THE PRICES GO UP. PURE GREED. IT SUCKS THAT THEY ARE GETTING INVOLVED WITH THIS. I WANTED TO GET A EBOOK READER BUT NOW AMAZON IS CHARGING MORE FOR EBOOKS BECAUSE THEY WERE FORCED TO CHARGE MORE. ALL BECAUSE OF APPLE. I HATE APPLE.
@Joseph Mama Even better: WSJ charges $140 for WSJ.com + print Journal, which works out to $11.67/mo.
So, for a 35% discount, you can get both the PRINT and the WEB versions instead of the iPad version!
What are they thinking?
@Mr w00t If you've already got the device .. nothing needs to be done to sell the magazine. I don't know anyone buying the device just to read the WSJ.
@Mr w00t Agree, the next obvious question will be, are readers willing to pay online news? if they can have it on anther source. I guess the answer is also obvious for this one. Opinions: http://bit.ly/scrutiny-apple-ipad-view
@engadgetcomexcludeengadget
Um, I think he was referring to a cell phone bill, not a landline....
@Brent1700
I can't wait to jailbreak my iPad. $500 for thousands of free apps,ebooks, music and videos? HELL YEAH :)
Dear Men's Health:
We didn't ask for you to meet us in the middle, just to actually give us some kind of break rather than hogging all the extras for yourself.
If WSJ wants grow in the untapped market of young people that don't read very much news, they're going to have to do better than $ 17.99. It's just too expensive- $5 maybe. At $2.99 I would subscribe as a no brainer (even if it is the WSJ:)
Many WSJ fans might be happy about this price but most people will shrug it off as too expensive. Make it cheap though, and people will buy it to try it or START reading newspaper- which is the goal WSJ needs to happen.
I might very well try reading Esquire because of it's low price model, Men's health is a little steep and may only buy once in a while if I really feel like I want what's in that particular issue.
If publisher's relax their death grip on prices and price their publications that users are comfortable with (seems to be $1.99 - $3.99) they could actually GROW in business rather than shrink and possibly die.
@think before you react
Don't forget that Apple often discount itunes cards. Have received discounts of up to 50% (in Australia) on top ups. If you can take advantage of this the subscription price may not be that bad
@think before you react
WSJ isn't the exactly the first thing young people would read in the morning regardless of subscription price. I think their pricing is to stay competitive to print and to cater to certain investor and professional demographics.
@think before you react
At $17.99 a month I'd have to get subscription to a lot more than WSJ. Maybe if they all got together and gave me a NYT, Newsweek, WSJ, and Economist for $17.99 a month they'd have a deal.
As it is getting a single paper every morning just isn't worth that money to me.
@think before you react Yeah, and the WSJ would then not have the extra consumers required to offset all their losses of revenue from the people that currently subscribe. Never going to happen.
@think before you react
$2 per month doesn't pay the salary of the highly-trained reporters and editors working for them. It'd be a recipe for disaster, as once you set the price that low, people expect it to always be that low, and then you die off from lack of revenue instead of lack of subscribers.
People need to wake up and realize that this honeymoon period of not paying for news is going to have a rough end when subscribers to the physical product die out over the next 20 years.
@think before you react I couldn't disagree more, this isn't about getting the news into more hands, its about getting the full paper on an electronic device. As someone who buys the paper every day i welcome the price of $17.99 a month, hopefully the price in Australia is similar (post exchange rate obviously) as a current subscription to the online end of the Financial Review here is currently $1140 per annum, simply because it is not available on an e-reader is my reason for sticking to the paper version, i don't read the paper at my desk, i read it on the bus, at the coffee shop, on my deck, in the lounge at the airport, over breakfast ect these are all times that i do not wish to pull out a big clunky hot laptop and prefer the broad sheet however the iPad seems to offer the perfect electronic solution to that. Furthermore for someone in finance i do like to keep up to date with the US markets, having a subscription to the better papers from the states in this format will be fantastic. All in all, bring it on, the price point is just right, good journalism delivered to a device at a reasonable price.
@Paul Ryan
Which is why these businesses need to start looking at different business models. The old one isn't going to work for my generation. We don't sit down and read the news paper. Should we? Probably, but fact of the matter is we don't. We also won't pay this amount of money for a digitally distributed copy of something. With this model, the only thing that WSJ really has to pay for is the writing staff. They no longer have to pay to print this stuff, pay the people that will print it, etc.
And $2 won't pay for those writers? Have you SEEN the amount of money good app dev. have been able to make?
I assume you get to keep the magazine after you have downloaded it. I have stacks of creative mags lying around for reference. It would be if I could just back them up to my main desktop/laptop and copy them to my iPad when I need to use them.
Any word on how big the files will be per issue?
@soopah256
A few KB up to a few MB. Not very much.
@think before you react ah okay. I figured the interactive media elements would start hogging up a bunch of space. Like with what ViV mag showed...
@soopah256
I expect those to be the exception to most publications.even still, I don't see them going above 50MB. Which is very large for a publication.
@soopah256 I'm guessing the video files aren't compressed into the magazine file, but streamed from an online source.
Dear publishers
You guys are truly dinosaurs! You are just too stupid to figure out why you are going broke. $4.99 for a digital version of your mag? Seriously? Thanks for the attempted gouge, but I hope you fail miserably. Welcome to the new world, give it away like Google and make money in advertising, or fail! I will be a day one owner of 2 iPads and will never help support this kind of crap.
Thanks
@cedars1974
I'm lost, do I give you a + or a - ?
I was so close to giving you a plus but then you ended it on a minus! LOL
@cedars1974
Well, Apple "helped" the publishers with their pricing.
ebooks for Kindle were selling for $9.99. Then, Apple announced 13-15$ ebooks for the iPad. Lots of publishers quickly followed suit and forced Amazon to sell Kindle ebooks at those higher prices.
@cedars1974 : Then people will whine about all the ads.
so the WSJ is going to end up on appul0us or TPB......now that's funny....
@ummmwhat
Appulous is long gone.
apptrackr is where the pirates dock their ships
@ddddd
Hulu will turn subscription soon, and not because of Apple, but because they're not doing well financially. By "not doing well" it mean losing money or it could mean not making enough (I'm guessing the latter.) Either way, Hulu will go mobile with subscription. The iPad might be the device they test it on, or it might not. If Hulu charges tho- don't expect Apple to be the sole cause of it.
The high cost of magazines in a store is supposed to pay for the printing and shipping of the magazines themselves and the ads are supposed to pay the majority of profit to the magazine company.
Why are these companies now trying to still charge us the same amount of money when they no longer have to pay for the printing and shipping of these virtual magazines?
You pay for Photoshop and Illustrator designs or whatever else they use, yes ... but not printing/shipping. I'm sure they have to pay Apple for something, but it's the circulation/viewership that gives them the most revenue (just like for TV programming).
You can now do animated ads in your virtual magazines (so they'll get more attention and hence ... more money). Magazines show Product Ads. Readers pay for Products seen in Ads. Product companies pay for Ads to Magazine Companies. Don't be greedy or we'll just as easily go to our internet browser.
@Meekermoloko
Silly ignorant consumer. Price doesn't depend on their costs, but what you are willing to pay. Go look at Apple and their profit margins.