Newspaper Give-aways

In his column in the Telegraph this week, he media pundit Roy Greenslade discussed what he called the viagra of free giveaways that all the British papers now seem addicted to. A paper such as The Times can now expect to put on 250,000 copies when it gives away a free DVD. The trouble is, those sales melt away the next day. Greenslade sees this as a problem for the papers, and in that he is undoubtably right. But the other point to make about it is that those 250,000 obviously don’t really want a newspaper at all. They just want a free DVD. As the technology to transmit and burn DVDs over the web becomes more widely available, it may not be long before people don’t need to get a paper for a free DVD. They’ll just get one from the web. Yet when people can get free DVD’s from the internet, what will the newspapers give away then to boost their sales?

This entry was posted on November 18th, 2005 and is filed under Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.