10/8/04: Free and Worth Every Cent

I guess it started when the New York Post dropped their price to 25 cents an issue a couple of years ago.  Or maybe it was in the mid-late 90's when the Voice went from $1.25 to FREE.  Hell, it's probably been going on since the advent of newspapers, and you see it in TV and magazines and any other ad-driven medium as well. The goal, of course, is to maximize your revenue.  How best to do it is a tough question facing any publisher, and there's a simple formula that helps them decide.  Basically, if we lower the price or give our product away for free, we will increase circulation.  Can we increase it enough so that the loss of revenue from the lowered purchase price is more than offset by the increase we can charge our advertisers, as they are now reaching more eyeballs?  It's a gamble, I guess.

For those of you living outside New York City, the reason I bring it up is the arrival over the last few months of two free daily newspapers, AM New York & Metro. During morning rush hour, you will be offered one or both of these new dailies at just about every subway station in Manhattan (and possibly the other boroughs as well). New Yorkers are pretty tired of having things handed to them on the street, so for these new entries to have a chance to succeed, they have to be handing you something worth grabbing.  As Mitch Hedberg put it, "When someone hands you a flier, it's like they're saying, 'Here, you throw this away.'"  And judging from the quality of the two papers, they clearly have to accomplish this goal of grabworthiness on a very tight budget. 

In my opinion, they are right on the border of success. Like, they're good enough to take one if you have a ride over ten minutes long and you know the train won't be crowded.  You take one of the two papers, read everything you need to read over the next ten to twenty minutes, and then you toss it into the garbage on the platform when you arrive at your stop.  Pretty wasteful, but it's pretty convenient as well.  I imagine if I was a work pooper, it would be worth grabbing both AM NY and Metro, one for the ride and one for your potty break.  But I am not a work pooper, and if I was, I doubt I would be so brazen as to head down the hall with one of these papers tucked under my arm. 

So the papers are readable enough that you will take one for free on most days. Barely.  But they are pretty bad.  Make that very bad.  There is a significant dropoff in quality between the regular NYC tabloids and the freebies. The freebies are just bad enough that you might consider buying a Post for a quarter instead.  The freebies are very, very amateurish.  But like the internet, these papers appear to be an outlet for those whose viewpoints are either too controversial or too stupid to find their way into the mainstream.  It's kind of fun, like a college newspaper. Sometimes, a brilliant voice that would never be heard in a real newspaper sings through beautifully. But more often, it's just some douchebag running his mouth, like a blog on dirty recycled paper.

Today I read an opinion column in Metro that cracked me up for a number of reasons.  It wasn't particularly well written, and the guy almost completely failed to make his point.  It was some bullshit about extreme sports and born-again Christianity. But he did say a couple of things that you don't expect to see in a free daily paper grabbed by every kid in the city on their way to school. My favorite being:

"Take it from me: Born-again Christianity and adolescence is a dangerous combination simply because of the whole "abstinence thing." Your teen years (13-18, preferably) are the best time to engage in indiscriminate sex with uncaring acquaintances. Skydiving and base jumping are nothing compared to the self-satisfaction one feels when sexually active at an early age."

Not exactly the New York Times. I don't know why I found that so amusing, maybe because teenagers have never really needed encouragement from a fool in a free newspaper to get their freak on.  I also like that he says, "Take it from me," as if he knows what the fuck he's talking about.  We should take it from you because you are an expert in what again...? When you hear somebody start a sentence with "Take it from me" you can be fairly certain some unsupported horseshit is about to flow from their lips. "Take it from me" gets the shoe. It's also funny how he says "your teen years" and then feels the need to clarify his point as "13-18, preferably." As if the pleasures of indiscriminate sex suddenly go sharply downhill the moment you turn 19. Here's the column.

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I know most of you are too cool to be impressed by celebrity sightings.  If you weren't, you wouldn't be reading such a hip, happening site as this.  But I'm a dork, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you that if you want to see some famous people, you should head to Cafe Luxembourg on West 70th street.  It's good (although overpriced) food, and here is a list of celebrities we've spotted there:

-Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker (last night, together with two other actor types I didn't recognize)
-Robin WIlliams (last time we were there)
-Liam Neeson (like 4 times)
-Peter Riegert
-Lenny Kravitz and Nicole Kidman (together)
-Michael Strahan

Not bad.  Sarah Jessica Parker looked very good, much less leathery and makeup-encrusted than you're used to seeing her on TV.

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This is one of those little crossroads moments at the verbungle.com offices. Nobody here is really happy with the product as it now stands.  We're like the Metro of bullshit websites. We're considering a number of major changes, including:

-Using a program like Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal or Movable Type for the blog entries.  I need something that's going to organize my shit for me.  Any recommendations are welcome.
-At the very least, organizing the entries so you can click or link on an individual entry.  I'm trying this starting today.
-Changing the format/content in some substantial and interesting way. Again, your feedback is welcome.
-Publish less often; maybe something halfway decent every week or so, instead of something lame every damn night. Although posting nightly is highly addictive.
-Ending the site completely and immediately, recharging for a few months and coming back (or not) with something newer and cooler.
-Ending the site in March of 2005, which will mark two years on the job (my domain registration also expires then, so it might be a convenient time to hang it up).

Of course, these feelings usually pass, so the eight of you can likely expect to see more of the same crap in the upcoming weeks and months.  But if you have any ideas at all on how to make things more better, please let me know.

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The new empeetrey comes from Beck.  It's from back when he was still fun, as evidenced by one of my all-time favorite lines:

"smokin' broken pencils and beatin' up kids"

It's called "Fume," and I hope you enjoy it.