Pricing and pricing policies from the perspective of a subscription agent

Abstract

I would like to start with something completely different. Directories are relics of the old economy that everyone thought was going to be killed by the internet. That is before the business completely reinvented itself and what you see here is a modern directory, one of the most innovated directories in the world, which is incorporated streaming streetscapes into the directory search. When you look up a business, you can go down the street, turn the corner, go back and see everything. The big predators have all caught the scent: Local Google, local Amazon and local Yahoo are all online directories and all want to get into that business. That is simply because it turns out that, by nothing that the directories have actually done by themselves and by pure luck, the business is perfectly suited for internet. It has great content for proximity searching. This means that you can look for the closest flower shop, closest taxi, etc. This content is then been integrated into mapping and navigation systems. It can be used in your PDAs via mobile internet and voice over IP (VOIP) interfaces. All this is just starting, I have no idea what anybody’s Skype number is or their Google Talk number is. But if you go to White Pages and look up Thomas Snyder, then you can just click and a do a pc to pc VOIP call. It turns out that about 40 percent of all internet search is local and all the search engines want to bring all this content together. As mentioned before, nothing the directories have ever done for this development. However, it is an example of an industry that by pure luck is perfectly suited for everything that is happening on the internet. What does this have to do with STM and professional content publishing? Both sectors actually have a lot in common. Each sector thinks that their sector is completely unique and not comparable to any other. For example, I ordered some Christmas presents for my godson via Amazon. I ordered four books from four different publishers and they all came together. The next day I got an email saying that two would be too late and that they would send the first two in a separate package and the other one sent after Christmas. This is a very similar process to what we do as Swets and there reminded me very much of the business they were in. Everyone is talking about the competition which they believe to be evil, dishonest and using dubious price techniques, but always great at marketing. Everyone thinks that internet has proven to be really disruptive and everybody is struggling with getting their operations and customers service departments to meet the customer needs. Furthermore, you often hear about the legacy systems that are driven by some dark mysterious forces. Each business is thinking about how the old fundamentals do remain the same after a major technological disruption. And all players within each sector are struggling to find the ultimate knock out combination in P & E pricing. What is often forgotten however is that many business sectors are confronted with very similar challenges. The publishing sector has been incredibly successful for decades and even centuries. But publishing is in the business of information and we are in the middle of the beginning of the information revolution. Things were changing all around us and they are changing really fast.