The New York Post: Another Company Bribing Customers

There seems to be a rash of desparate companies offering steep discounts or incentives to get and keep customers. Joining the role is the New York Post. According to the Village Voice story, cutting costs and losing money has long been a customer acquisition strategy of the News Corp. property:

A few months before resigning in 2005, Post publisher Lachlan Murdoch acknowledged to BusinessWeek that halving the cover price widened the paper's annual loss, rumored to be in the tens of millions. In the same article, he said he intended to restore the paper's 50-cent cover price if and when the Post passed the Daily News in circulation, adding, "We very much care that it make money one day." But it seems pretty clear that "one day" will not come until the Post is straddling the bleeding, lifeless corpse of the undercut Daily News. (Current Post publisher Paul Carlucci did not return calls for comment.)

And that's pretty much what it will take, because customer bribery as an acquisition tactic is a poor retention strategy. Once the price goes up, many of those new readers might well go elsewhere. The interesting question, brought up by Piet Bakker, who blogs about free newspapers, is whether newspapers will go to completely free copies and rely on other revenue streams.