Let Them Eat Ads
We’re heading toward a bifurcated internet
When I was a teenager, my parents paid $3.80 a week for daily delivery of the local paper. It seemed like pretty much everybody did, based on the number of newspapers lying at the ends of driveways when I walked to the bus stop every morning. In 1990, 62 million newspapers were sold each weekday, in a nation of 92 million households.
That weekly price of $3.80 equates to about $8.45 in today’s money, meaning that my mom and dad paid the equivalent of about $440 per year for their local newspaper.
Is there any online news source for which you’d pay $440 per year? In December, the New York Times was running a deal where you could give a yearlong gift subscription (including all the extra stuff, like Cooking and The Athletic) for $60. Even a more niche, premium publication like The Economist was going for $146 per year. These prices may have reflected holiday sales drives, but it’s not uncommon to get deals like these throughout the year.
And, of course, most people don’t pay for the news at all. Reuters finds that only 21% of Americans pay for the news, a number that’s higher than the global average of 17%. It will not surprise you that wealthier Americans are more likely to pay for the news than people in other income groups.
