Why Is Time Charging $5 for Its iPad App?
One subplot amid the iPad hype: A lot of grumbling about the cost of the apps, particularly from established media companies. — Example A: Time Magazine, which is asking $4.99 a week for its app-the same price you'd pay if you bought the paper edition at a newsstand.
Context & Ripple Effects
Time's $4.99-per-week iPad app lands amid a broader moment of publishers testing whether readers will pay for digital news at all — the New York Times spent 2009 weighing a $5 monthly web-access fee, so the question of what a legacy title charges for pixels was already open when the iPad arrived.
First-order effects
- Buyers of Time's app pay full newsstand price — $4.99 a week — for an edition with no printing or distribution costs behind it, making the app a live test of whether the brand alone carries print-parity pricing.
Second-order effects
- Every other magazine deciding its own tablet price now benchmarks against Time's number, and the grumbling among established media houses suggests many see $4.99-a-week as a ceiling they cannot justify without added value like the exclusive-content logic of bundling.
Third-order effects
- If print-parity pricing sticks across major titles, magazines will have defined the tablet edition as a premium replacement for paper rather than a cheap digital add-on — a structural choice that shapes subscription bundles and platform fees for years.
The trend: Legacy publishers are anchoring their first tablet-era prices to legacy newsstand rates rather than to the lower marginal cost of digital distribution.