News Corp surpasses 200k paid subscribers on tablets
updated 07:20 pm EST, Thu March 10, 2011
Company said to be surprised by performance
Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton has highlighted the strong performance of paid subscriptions for News Corp's tablet editions. The number of paid subscribers is said to have quadrupled from last year, reaching a current level of 200,000, according to Hinton's comments today at a speech in Boston.
"What surprised us is that other periodicals than ours seem to be getting good traction" Reuters quoted him as saying.
The 200k figure is a combination of News Corp's paid subscriber base on all tablet-size devices, including the iPad, Android tablets, the Kindle, and the Nook. In contrast, the print edition currently represents a circulation of approximately 1.6 million.
Despite the strong sales numbers on tablets, the company has yet to disclose performance numbers for paid subscriptions accessed from smartphone platforms.
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Joined: Aug 2008
Digital version is 12.5% of print circulation
Not bad, since the digital papers are in their infancy. Perhaps this should be a wake-up call for other newspapers!