News Corp’s Times Hikes Digital Fee To Milk iPad Riches

paidcontent reporting:

With Rupert Murdoch in London to launch the Sunday Sun whilst grasping News International’s crisis for a second time, News Corp is doubling its digital subscription fees for The Times and Sunday Times, to take more money from wealthy iPad owners.

From March 1, The Times and Sunday Times’ Digital Pack (for web, mobile and tablet) will hike from £2 a week (billed as £8.88 per month) to £4 per week. The web-only fee of £2 per week will remain unchanged.
A Times spokesperson tells paidContent: “We’re not ‘doubling’ our price. We’re introducing a new pack that includes all digital products. Previously, we were offering iPad access as complementary offer.” The difference may effectively be semantic.
Existing digital subscribers, of whom there are 119,255 for the Times, will stay on the previous rate until 2013. After that time, if the current subscriber count held steady, we could speculate that the rate increase would double the publisher’s theoretical maximum monthly digital income to £1.9 million, before stripping out commission to distributors like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), a few corporate licenses etc. Doubtless, The Times would also like to add new subscribers by that time.

Some would be forgiven for thinking higher fees may make new customer acquisition more difficult. But the average salary of the (Times’) iPad reader is £109,000 and over 15 percent of the its daily iPad audience earns over £200,000 a year, the publisher told paidContent last month. That’s ample room to bump the price.http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-news-corps-times-hikes-digital-fee-to-milk-ipad-riches