How Agnostic is The Economist About Print Versus Digital?

Joshua Gans asks How agnostic is The Economist about print versus digital?.

"So I took a look at said pricing. For Canada, the digital only subscription was $129.99 and print subscription was $137.19, a difference of $7.20 annually. That seemed a tad low. When I moved to Australia, the difference was $146 per annum. Now that seemed more like it. Why the difference? Well, it could be that advertising is worthless in Australia and print advertising is worth relatively more than digital advertising in Canada. So while print costs may be higher they might be offset by higher advertising rates.

However, there are two clues that this isn’t really the story. First, consider the US. The difference between the print and the digital subscriptions is $0. As the print option includes the digital one, this is telling me that The Economist does not, in fact, have a digital option in the US. They want everyone to get the print edition even if they toss it in the bin except when they have a plane flight and need to for take off or landing. This is hardly agnostic behaviour. What’s more if advertising rates are higher for print than for digital units then all these people being shipped physical copies are polluting the advertising numbers there. Seems like a strange and value destroying thing to be doing."

I was surprised to find out that in the US the digital and print cost the same, because when I renewed back in November, the digital was cheaper. I paid $110 for a year and remember the print (which includes digital) to be more like $135. Now it seems both are $127.

The Economist is I think the best iPad magazine by far. It recreates the articles but the issues are real text so they are easy to resize and small (and fast) to download. The images and graphs are all included. There aren't too many ads and it's easy to navigate. Also, it's kinda cool that you can download an audio file for each issue with someone reading the article (not a computer generated voice). Also the sharing features are good enough (Facebook, Twitter, email).

Still I'm not keeping up with it as much as I used to. Too many other things to read and without a pile growing on the coffee table to remind me, I often skip it. I'm not sure I'll renew for $127.