Why are YBW article-downloads so damned expensive??

Greenheart

Greenheart

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£6.95. :eek: Nearly SEVEN POUNDS for a thirty year-old, 5-page article from a yachting magazine. Why?

If these were £1 per time, I'd download half a dozen every week, and I'd feel my life was richer for it. But at these prices, I wouldn't pay for the download even if I could afford it!

Presumably all archived YBW magazines have been scanned, so their content is on a hard-drive somewhere?

I mean, when somebody clicks to download, it isn't a case of some old boy with a trolley and a bad back, going to the basement to rummage through cobwebby boxes for the dusty back-issue in question, then bringing it up to the office to be scanned, stopping for coffee and a chat with the janitor, and calling the exercise an hour's work?

How the hell did the chaps in charge decide that a seven quid fee would encourage more than a tiny proportion of interested people to shell out? Surely more people would buy, if the cost reflected the ease of delivering the product? (And its value!)

Seven quid...that would have been about the price of a six-month subscription to the magazine it came from! :(
 
Completely agree. There are numerous articles I would happily buy if the prices weren't so mind-bendingly expensive. Especially since I seem to recall that you can now buy complete editions digitally at the normal cover price.....yet one article costs near double that. Go figure.
 
To go to the trouble of digitising content and subsequently pricing it prohibitively expensively is madness - the marketing department strikes again...
 
djbreeze said:
To go to the trouble of digitising content and subsequently pricing it prohibitively expensively is madness - the marketing department strikes again...
Click to expand...

Simple! The Reason why they are priced so high is because not enough people are ordering.:D

Very clever marketing...........not.
 
A message to YBW bosses. In bold, so they can't miss it.

Thanks for those responses. Nothing from the chaps in charge yet, I see... :rolleyes:

Just for clarity, may I claim to speak for a fair few Practical Boat Owner/Yachting Monthly readers, who recall numerous articles they'd like to read again, and who would certainly pay for that undoubted pleasure, if the fee was slashed to reflect the product's value?

Right, this is for the YBW bosses:

WE WANT TO READ FONDLY-REMEMBERED ARCHIVED MAGAZINE ARTICLES, AND WE'D BE READY TO PAY £1 FOR EACH ONE WE DOWNLOAD. BUT WE WON'T BUY ANY, AT THE PRESENT PRICE. HOW HAPPY ARE YOU GENTLEMEN, WITH CURRENT SALES?
 
Good point. I've paid for one back article, the review of the Cornish Yawl which I wanted to read before we bought Kindred Spirit. I begrudged the price of that then, but it seemed valid in the context of buying a boat. Other than that, I regularly have searches pop up old articles that may be relevant, but there's no way I'm paying £7 to find out.

If they were £1 each, I'm sure I'd end up buying more than 7 of them in total.

Wire it up to PayPal as well so I just have to click a button and type my password instead of digging out a debit card, reading off various numbers, and waiting for the "Halifax Secure" screen to churn through. Yes, I know they are borderline evil and probably have higher fees, but they make purchasing nearly frictionless if you already have an account and making it easy for people to give you money is always a good thing especially for small "shall I or shan't I?" purchases. 99p each and frictionless paying-by-typing-your-password has certainly worked for Apple's App Store.

Pete
 
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I think I have downloaded 3 articles before. Two of which the description I based the purchase on was, shall we say wide of the mark & not what I was looking for.

I certainly wil never use the download function again.

I know of other magazines I read occasionally where the entire back catalog is available for free to subscribers. Seems an excellent feature and something which would make me consider renewing my subs for.
 
dancrane said:
£6.95. :eek: Nearly SEVEN POUNDS for a thirty year-old, 5-page article from a yachting magazine. Why?

If these were £1 per time, I'd download half a dozen every week, and I'd feel my life was richer for it. But at these prices, I wouldn't pay for the download even if I could afford it!

Presumably all archived YBW magazines have been scanned, so their content is on a hard-drive somewhere?

I mean, when somebody clicks to download, it isn't a case of some old boy with a trolley and a bad back, going to the basement to rummage through cobwebby boxes for the dusty back-issue in question, then bringing it up to the office to be scanned, stopping for coffee and a chat with the janitor, and calling the exercise an hour's work?

How the hell did the chaps in charge decide that a seven quid fee would encourage more than a tiny proportion of interested people to shell out? Surely more people would buy, if the cost reflected the ease of delivering the product? (And its value!)

Seven quid...that would have been about the price of a six-month subscription to the magazine it came from! :(
Click to expand...
could not agree more
 
It's a bargain. Not only is it delivered in digital form, its even aged for you. Not for us a crisp digitally enhanced document, no its as real as can be, retro in every way: dog ears scanned, faded photocopy, multiple copy faithfully scanned, fully contrasted black pictures and skilfully curved text illegibly fading into the virtual spine with hints of staple.

COULD DO BETTER - we only need fag ash, coffee cup rings and bacon butty grease marks for that authentic 70s document!
 
I've never downloaded an article or even used the copy service that is advertised as it is rediculiously expensive. As an intermittant annual subscriber, I took to scanning any articles that I may at some point be interested in when it came time to recycle the mags because of this.

Scruff has the right idea in that if you are an annual subscriber, the digital back catalogue should be available to you (they could put a page limit on it per month or the likes if they were worried about abuse of the system) and this would be a big sellng point for becoming a subscriber.

It would be interesting to know how many digital downloads are made.
 
djbreeze said:
To go to the trouble of digitising content and subsequently pricing it prohibitively expensively is madness - the marketing department strikes again...
Click to expand...

Not the marketing department, or even sales, they are different functions, but both do understand the concept of pricing but the accountants rule and because the paper copy was sold for that price they add VAT and charge the same for the download, improves the margin.

Mind you I did meat one accountant who understood marginal pricing and one who understood the concept of market pricing.
 
Manny years ago when ordering back articles you got the issue in question or a copy of the article when the magazine was out of stock.
I suppose that's the reason for the pricing, it never got adjusted to modern times.

In these modern times I would suggest making copies older then a year available for free, and searchable by search engine, as they still include advertisements.
Obviously that would not make Zinio happy, but then it’s the readers that are important, which in turn attracts advertisers,...
 
Hmm. Well, however the price-setters arrived at £6.95 per article, I think it is beyond doubt a mistake, in the judgement of the customers who will (or won't) make the product pay.

Thinking for a minute, I recalled eight boat-reviews, stories and yachting news reports from the magazines in the 1980s...

...and I'd certainly hand over £8 to have them all. I wouldn't have to ask whether I really wanted them, I'd just hit the button and buy...

...BUT...if the gentle pleasure of re-living eight themes from a quarter-century ago, was going to cost £56, then, no thanks! The past can stay there, it can be forgotten!

IPC has an asset here, if it prices the product sensibly. Their archives are interesting, but not vital. So they can't invariably make money from back-issues, because articles' relevance is reduced by their age. We'd like to read 'em...but only at a reasonable cost.

A response from IPC personnel would be nice... :rolleyes:
 
I wanted to order an article last year, but decided i wasnt going to pay 7 quid for it, so didnt in the end.

I guess they dont like the hassle of selling them, so they price them to stop you buying them
 
Dan,

another factor I'd think in favour of your point I'm guessing, I am sure magazine circulation must be significantly down.

So in theory that would allow retasking the odd member of staff to looking after archives and making them available.

The archives will I suspect become increasingly valuable to IPC as a money making resource, but only if they price it right.
 
Agree current price is too high, but there will be fixed costs to process payments, but how about a 'Token' approach, whereby say £10 allows access to 5 articles, £20 gives 15, etc?
 
Like other posters I too have bought a digital download version of a review of a boat I was considering buying, and like most here choose not to pay such high sums for other downloads that I might otherwise be interested in reading.

I restore old motorcycles and find that several ebay sellers offer old motorcycle magazines for sale at very reasonable prices. I generally buy a dozen or so that feature road tests on the bike in question, and find it helps build a very interesting age appropriate portfolio when I come to sell the machine in question. Perhaps we should all sell our old PBOs etc. on ebay!
 
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