In April 2018. I attended Dani komunikacija conference in Croatia. I really enjoy this conference every year, but I am very picky about the lectures I attend. Except for the lecture from Brad Parscale (Trump’s campaign manager) I was really interested in a lecture from Steve Lok, Head of Martech & Ops at The Economist.

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The lecture itself was really great. Steve was talking about many things and technologies they use at The Economist I feel sorry not having a pen and paper to take some notes. In recent years, they managed to switch from mostly advertising-based revenue to mostly subscription-based revenue.

Also, he sad that around 2/3 of their subscribers use print edition together with digital, which for the moment felt weird. But later on, I realized why.

After the talk, Steve got some questions from the audience and one of the questions was about the future of the print. He said that print will thrive in the future and it will stay with us!

I was really surprised because I think otherwise. So then I went to their subscription page and this is what I got:

No matter what plan you select, you will pay the same price! They have print-only and digital-only listed at 20EUR as anchors, so Print+Digital as 20EUR looks like absolutely the best offer. Now I understand why most of their subscribers use both editions – because the price is the same! You can read more about using anchors at Win Without Pitching.

What this means to you and to all publishers?

Learn from the best. The Economist realized print-only is going to be dead, digital-only is maybe not yet ready, but many people like to use both editions. They combined both editions in one best value offer and surely increased the number of subscribers overall. Great job guys!

Use anchors in pricing whatever you sell.