£1?
If he seriously thinks it's reasonable to charge the same for a day's access to a website that he would for a physical newspaper, he's insane. A newspaper is printed on actual paper, with actual ink, with machines that consume power, run by people who need paying. It's delivered in lorries by people who need paying, then processed at depots, then delivered again, then sold in retail establishments, who themselves take account for around 20% of the cost..
Distribution costs for newspaper account for roughly 50% of the cost.
Source: http://www.spatialheadworks.com/2010/02/12/concept-digitally-distributed-newspapers/
While 70-80% of revenue comes from advertising.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper#Advertising
So he's :
- charging the same price to the casual reader as he would for a print edition that costs twice as much to produce.
- thereby making the casual readers, the very people who he needs to attract in order to increase readership, subsidise his own flawed business model
- thereby reducing to near zero the proportion of casual readers
- thereby severely reducing the advertising money which accounts for the vast majority of revenue anyway
Explain how this can possibly work? Just because they can't all run at a profit at the moment, it doesn't mean they should perform suicide. Print is dying, the subscribers are dying of old age, the internet is the future with its low cost of distribution. He's lancing himself out of the online news business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
