The Economist's attempts at creating a sensible digital pricing model has just been a range of awful options. From the Kindle, to the iPad, etc.

To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account, than it is to save the materials and costs and go digital-only.

For all the normative claims they make about the need for better environmentalism and economic policies, they sure seem to have difficulty keeping their own house in order.

I thought I had found a clever trick when I called them and asked them to stop physical delivery ( as will they do if you're going on an extended trip, for example ). The next week they also suspended my digital access...

I tried to explain to them that I didn't actually want the paper copy but it didn't register with them. When it came to renew, I let the subscription lapse because it felt so wasteful to be throwing the magazine straight from the letterbox into the recycling bin. And I wasn't prepared to pay more to go without the paper!

With only one or two exceptions where I like to keep print copies around for reference (or for travel use where I want something disposable–don't want to leave an iPad on the beach or by the pool, for example), I'm the same as you: it arrives, it goes straight to recycling, and I read it on my iPad/Kindle/whatever. Last year I went on a tear, trying to stop all paper delivery while retaining digital access.

Turns out very, very few publications were helpful. Everyone understood why I wanted to do it, but they make their ad money off of paper copies shipped. So, as with the Economist, you have a lot of rags who're talking the talk about conservation, provided it doesn't cost them a penny.

Sure, they'll charge the customer more for less.

A couple were great about it: a quick email and it was moved over to Newsstand, or their app, etc. But the rest, the bigger publications, almost uniformly baulked, and could never make it happen.

I even considered trying to shame them by creating a site so everyone see who's forward-thinking, and who's myopic. I may yet.

It kind of reaffirmed my view that the whole print industry is a broken model. The end result is that I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, since the ones that are supposed to have credibility about world affairs just lost it in my eyes, I couldn't take them seriously (not that I ever should have).

It's also made me extra sensitive to the whored-out nature of publications that take ad dollars.

As a result, I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, and focused my energy on the ones that operate from subscription models (which are more expensive individually, but I saved more than that getting there).

Turns out I'm getting better information, paying more attention to it, and don't have a stack of magazines to worry about recycling every month.

As in, if it costs $2 to deliver a print, and the content costs $4 to produce, and you want $1 of profit, you price it at $7.

If you take out the cost of delivery, and find that the software team (hosting, apps, web design, database etc) costs $1 which replaces the $2 print delivery, you price it at $6.

The $6 would be pretty much universal, the $7 might be $9 in some places where delivery is expensive.

Anyway their current pricing is one of those things that the market should sort out in a few years. Seems like they can temporarily get away with charging 2.5x the American price because the costs of mailing is so expensive. But once you get other media going fully digital, or even partially digital, with the ability to massively undercut that price while staying profitable, you'll probably see prices come down a bit (or stop growing as fast as the rest of the world.)

Shitty thing to do though. On the other hand, consider this... NZ is probably a bit of an outlier. A place without a big enough market to make massive shipments by relatively cheap water, forced to do expensive shipping, and small enough for local printing not to make much sense logistically, creating a huge gap between digital costs and print costs. A discount-on-print is probably a pretty smart, easy, straightforward and fair pricing model almost everywhere else. Is it a better alternative to go with a pricing model more convoluted, more volatile and less straightforward for the entire world market, to accommodate a small market? I might have made a similar pricing decision if I worked there. Anyone got other good ideas?

Wow, that's actually true (though I'm in Europe). I can consider myself lucky to have taken a 3-year subscription last summer under old pricing model. Now it's almost twice the price, it would also make me think twice now before renewing. I love the Economist and I do take a look at the Espresso from time to time, it's really well done, but, as a long time subscriber, I'm not willing to finance their video or "Buzzfeed model" experiments.

Annual subscription in the UK: £126 (~$187)

In the UK, we're being charged nearly 1.5 times as much and The Economist is based here!

Most Indians will not be able to buy it if the cost was 400 NZD per year but maybe New Zealanders can afford to pay 400 NZD per year.