Newspaper bought by Jeff Bezos in 2013 readjusted US digital subscription prices
Per Laura Hazard Owen*
In 2015, a few years after Jeff Bezos bought the The Washington Postthe newspaper announced a new benefit for users of Amazon Prime: digital signatures of post with discount.
The users of Prime would receive 6 months of free digital access to the newspaper and then be charged US$3.99 (R$20.9) per month “indefinitely”. At the time, a regular priced subscription was US$ 9.99 (R$ 52.4) per month.
After 7 years, the “indefinitely” seems to be over: subscribers to Amazon Prime who paid this fee of US$ 3.99 (R$ 21) per month were informed that its monthly price will triple to US$ 12 (R$ 62.9). This is normal rate currently offered by the post. Separately, and confusingly, you can also buy a subscription to Washington Post Kindle what “includes unlimited access to all content on The Washington Post Company website and The Washington Post Company mobile apps”for US$ 7.99 (R$ 41.9) per month on the amazon website . This price is above US$ 5.99 (R$ 31.4) per month a year ago.
The price increase occurs when the digital business of the post seem to have stopped: the New York Times recently reported that the post has lost digital subscribers since 2020 and that its online ad revenue has dropped. I asked for a comment to post and I’ll update here if I get a response.
The change implies, however, that the newspaper no longer sees a sufficient advantage in introducing subscribers to the Amazon Prime to the newspaper that is willing to subsidize them. O Washington Post still offers many general price promotionsNonetheless.
Users may have missed a $3.99 monthly fee even if they weren’t reading much of the postt. Will that change when the price rises to $12 a month, entering Spotify and Netflix territory? We will see (or maybe not, since the post does not publicly disclose its subscription numbers).
Meanwhile, the annual price of Amazon Prime rose to US$ 139 (R$ 734) in the 1st half of 2022.
The newspaper Washington Post informed that “Amazon Prime monthly fee subscribers of US$3.99 will be increased to US$7.99 per month on the next renewal date. They can also see the effective date of the new price by logging into MyPost. These subscribers were notified of a new inaccurate monthly fee. We reported the error and clarified the correct price.”
* Laura Hazard Owen is editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The text was translated by Victor Schneider. Read the original text in English.
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