With the rapid expansion of users getting their news from online sources, increasing printing costs and decreasing ad revenues, many newspapers are finding themselves in quite the bind. With or without a bad economy (unfortunately with at the moment), the traditional newspaper is in a rough spot.
Enter Amazon’s Kindle and the new Kindle 2, to be shipped later this month. With estimated sales figures of just over a quarter million units, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Granted, it’s not the approx. 2 million copies of USA Today in circulation, but it does reach numbers approaching other major city newspapers.
What does that mean for the two entities? Well, Kindle can provide a platform for easier delivery without the need to cut down trees and pay a delivery boy. Newspapers get a broad user base in the right demographic with less overhead than traditional print methods.
Seems like there might be some great cross-promotional advertising opportunities here, guys.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:09 am
It will be interesting to see what happens to the old print papers. I don’t foresee a subscription model working for them for very long. Embracing technologies like the Kindle might do the trick, but they would probably need to be fully ad supported.