The the temporary bridge between where we are now and free is officially “Name Your Own Price”. Paste magazine is giving out subscriptions for NYOP (here).
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- By rhaggart
- In Photography Business
The the temporary bridge between where we are now and free is officially “Name Your Own Price”. Paste magazine is giving out subscriptions for NYOP (here).
11 Comments
what the hell is driving this?
Great way to promote, I guess. I’d never read the magazine, but now I got me a $5 subscription. Also, I’ve never been a big Radiohead fan, but now I’m giving them a listen.
Vince, think about it this way. How much does a company like paste have to spend to reach market visibility. If I were them I would have taken my traditional ad budget for a quarter and run a promotion like this. Then you’re in a whole lot more homes and you havent lost anything, you’ve just converted your budgets. Top it all off when the subscription runs out you don’t get to name your price then and how many people will have converted to fans of the media thus paying a normal subscription price next time?
When you have a quality product and a marketing budget that can handle it; I think it’s a great concept. Like always though, you’ll have winners and losers of those who try it.
-a
So clever.
Customer acquisition is a huge expense in marketing. So think about this for a minute — a magazine is paid for almost entirely with ad revenue. Giving away subscriptions a) doesn’t hurt the bottom line and b) drives subscriber numbers up thus letting the ad sales dept charge more for each quarter-page.
As for Radiohead, they’re not doing anything but cutting out the middleman. The NYOP gimmick is just that — a gimmick. Even if overall revenue would be lower than going through EMI et al, their profit will be much, much higher because overhead is lower.
People keep calling this the “public radio” model but I don’t see that as a very good analogy. Public radio is a “get first, pay later” type of model which relies on rapport and guilt with its audience to generate revenue. Paste, Radiohead, et al are saying “Pay first, buy at whatever discount lets you purchase (because really, there would be discounts available eventually) our product.” An entirely different mindset for the purchaser.
I think this is one direction I see music in particular going in. It is basically agreeing that the material has lost any enforcable market price (due to theft, sharing etc.) but want to tap in to peoples feeling of guilt on empathy.
I think this is just the beginning…
Thanks, finally something worth paying a dollar for.
Unfortunately, nobody gets into public radio to get rich.
Sometimes when I work with non-profit environmental organizations whose cause I believe in I say “here’s what the market rate would be, pay what you can.” Sometimes they pay in full, sometimes they take me up on the offer and don’t pay anything. Then the next time they call they certainly remember that they didn’t pay last time and typically they will do whatever they can.
It’s important to make sure they understand the ‘market rate’ thing, and that it’s explained is such a way that they understand this is how I feed myself and the market rate is what I need to keep doing what I do.
In the end it’s really very similar if not the same concept as ‘name your own price.’ It’s worked well for me so far. Developed some good business relationships and had some fun.
I had a “Paste” moment last year in a Barnes and Noble. I had been looking at Paste since it started and thought it was a pretty nice mag and of course the included cd was great.
Well, I walked into the music section of the B and N and hanging all around were posters promoting new CD’s of singers I had actually heard of. After thinking for a brief moment that my hipness meter had mysteriously reappeared despite my age, I realized I had just read about all these new releases in the latest Paste. And not just a few, all of them, it was like the table of contents page of the magazine was cut up and pasted around the store.
That explained the recent increase in paper quality of the magazine. I would guess that for this particular publication, the business model has very little to do with the subsciption price.
and here I end up reading this post on your blog after I buy the current issue at Whole Foods
ended up subscribing anyway, interesting mag and naming your own price ain’t too shabby of a gimmick to take advantage of
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