New Scientist is getting it wrong.
I’ve long been a great fan of New Scientist. It presents scientific information at just the right level for me, with enough depth to be interesting and yet shallow enough that I can, usually, understand what is being talked about. Yet when my electronic subscription via Zinio expired in October last year I did not renew; and every time I’ve gone to look at renewing I’ve been hit with the same problem – I simply don’t like being discriminated against so overtly for being Australian.
Subscribing electronically is significantly cheaper than subscribing in hardcopy; avoiding paying the ‘dead tree premium’ saves almost $200 on a local annual subscription. And New Scientist works well on the iPad: it looks like the hardcopy and is easily readable. So it would seem that a Zinio subscription is a no-brainer.
But Zinio keeps sending me marketing offers for New Scientist. When I follow the links for the offer I’m eventually told that the offer is not available in Australia, only in the US. Now that’s frustrating because I’ve been led down the garden path by the offer, I’ve wasted my time and I don’t get the purported offer. Bad marketing all-in-all. But worse is the fact that it pushes my face in the price of the US version of the publication. The US, UK and Australian versions are for all intents and purposes identical bar the advertising. And bar the pricing. If I subscribe to New Scientist via Zinio in the US it costs US$72 for an annual subscription; the same thing in Australia costs A$125.
At current exchange rates, the Australian price is almost double the US price. And that’s simply annoying. There might, possibly be some justification for a price differential in the hardcopy prices given economies of scale – but I’m at a loss to see a justification for a differential in the online pricing. Other than the fact they seem to be able to get away with it.
I had started to put together a lovely little spreadsheet demonstrating the differences, but then I found someone had beaten me to it. Core Economics did a nice article with handy comparison spreadsheet here. They compare the prices of quite a range of publications and find that most have the same price here as in the US, but…
Notable exceptions are New Scientist, The Economist and National Geographic, which cost 1.85 times, 2.23 times and 2.36 times more in the Australian online store than in the US store, respectively.
As long as that goes on I’m going to vote with my money just to demonstrate to the publishers that in this day and age there’s no excuse for not looking at online distribution as a global market.
[...] also: I wrote about this in explaining why I wont subscribe to New Scientist a couple of months ago. Share this: Posted by Evan Predavec at 9:00 am Tagged with: [...]
Virtual magazines need virtual USA addresses to be delivered to, until this sort of practice is outlawed.
I realise this post was made over a year ago, but I wanted to let you know that you can trick Zinio into giving you a New Scientist sub for the american price. Log into the website and set it to the US store rather than the Australian store. Then update your address with a US one. Subscribe to New Scientist in the American store (your Oz credit card works fine). Switch your address and store country back to Australia and viola! 12 month New Scientist subscription without the “Australia Tax”.
Thanks for that it is interesting. Getting around it, doesn’t change the fact that it is wrong though. And if the publisher doesn’t even realise people are getting around it they’re not even getting a message that might make them change their approach. Ah, the dilemma – send a message or read the magazine…?
You’re missing the point. The cost of magazines is largely paid for by advertising revenue, not the revenue from readers purchasing the magazine. That is why magazines are so cheap is America – because advertisers pay a lot to access an enormous market. Australia is a tiny, remote, market and so the contribution your subscription makes to New Scientist’s revenue is far less than a US subscriber and less than a UK subscriber.
The pricing is fair. You might not like it, but it’s rational.
Chris,
In many cases what you say would be true. However the New Scientist is not your average magazine and its revenues are largely subscription driven.
Also, although this is an aside, it has one of the more international advertising markets available thanks to the combination of high-income and scientists it attracts both of which groups cross many boundaries which limit the advertising market for, say, a gossip magazine.
Not sure what New Scientist you read, but with all the jobs ads it has a higher ad content than most other content driven magazines and more in line with other trade magazines. It has around 35 editorial/content staff and about 30 staff selling advertising which indicates how important ads are.
As for your aside, it’s a nice theory, but the print editions are different for UK, US and Australia indicating that their market is not international.
Anyway, my point was that you said:”I’m at a loss to see a justification for a differential in the online pricing.” and my answer is that is because you ignored advertising and that the decision is not necessarily the ‘discrimination’ you assume it is.
A few years ago I spent some time with the New Scientist publishers and their business model. At least as things stood ten years ago subscriptions were their bread and butter – which is largely why Reed Elsevier loved them so. I’m sure the advertising revenue is not to be sneezed at but it certainly wasn’t their driver historically.
A quick look at the Reed Elsevier site doesn’t shed much light on the current situation, although interestingly they cite the New Scientist audience in terms of a “weekly worldwide audience”.
By the way, I do agree about Zinio. They do the same to me and send promotions which just waste time because they aren’t actually available outside the US. They even break the law in the UK by advertising prices excluding VAT and then add VAT (GST to you) at checkout. They are also typically pretty expensive compare with other providers (at least in the UK)
By the way, Andy’s trick assumes that you have a credit card (any one) registered to a US address. I do have so one of the few magazines I still read on Zinio is New Scientist because you can’t beat the $72 US price. However if you don’t then I doubt that just typing a US address in and trying to pay with a Aus registered credit card would work.
Actually Chris, I used my Australian credit card to get that Zinio sub.
They require a US postal address true, but they don’t seem to check where the card itself was issued. This was the case as of May 2012, I don’t know if that has since changed – I guess I’ll find out when it’s time to renew.
Andy – Just to clarify. You mean that there was no link between the card and the address you entered ? I know the country of issuance of the card doesn’t matter but I always assumed that the card was validated against the address of the subscription..
Thats right. I tried making up a nonsense US address first, which it rejected. Then I went to google maps, and picked a random, genuine street address in Portland, Oregon (as Oregon doesnt have a sales tax). That was accepted and my transaction went through.