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NY Post Slashes Price Back To 25 cents As NewsStand Sales Falter

The New York Post learned a marketing fact of life over the past couple of weeks – once you gain readership via a low price don’t assume you also captured the reading loyalty of your readers. Loyalty is very fickle these days -- double the price of the newspaper and readers will leave. It’s not size but price that counts.

In marketing campaigns year after year The Post has tried everything to overtake its arch-rival New York Daily News. It cut its newsstand price in half in 2000 to 25 cents and it has offered home subscriptions that work out at around 5 cents a copy. The newssstand price cut seems to have done the job – although it took seven years.  Curculation in 2000 was less than 500,000; At the end of March it had leaped to nearly 725,000.

And, yes, if you cut the price, they will come eventually, and the audit for the six-month period ending March 30  showed The Post finally pulling ahead of the Daily News, by some 6,600 copies daily. To celebrate the Post doubled the newsstand price back up to 50 cents to be even with the Daily News. But the arch-rival was having none of that and announced that for a week or so it would cut its price to 25 cents.

And the result of all that, apparently, is that The Post once again got slaughtered at the newsstand. Some Manhattan newsstands reported drops of 20% or so in Post sales whereby sales for the Daily News are said to have increased some 30%. So starting Thursday The Post dropped its pants back to 25 cents and that means that it will continue to bleed more red ink for some time to come, not that Rupert Murdoch, its owner, can’t afford it with most of News Corp. doing so well and therefore the shareholders continuing to allow him his “thing” with The Post. – May 11, 2007

Keywords:celebrities in court,tabloid press

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