The good people over at Asiajin reported earlier today that The Asahi Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in the world, will now offer digital subscriptions options. But it doesn’t come cheap.
For existing subscribers of the print edition (3800 yen, or approximately $47), the digital content can be accessed for an extra 1000 yen ($12) per month. If you’re not a print subscriber, it will cost 3800 yen for just digital. So clearly this is not a big push to get users to shift to away from paper.
And perhaps they doesn’t need to shift to digital yet. In contrast with other countries, circulation numbers seem to be doing just fine in Japan. In the chart below you can see a breakdown of the top 100 papers in the world as of 2005. See that giant blue area? Those are papers from Japan, although their numbers appear to have dropped since then.
I’m a little skeptical as to how good Asahi’s digital content will actually be, because it is clearly not a ‘digital first’ organization. Like most newspapers in the country, its online version is merely print copied to the web, with very little of the innovative interactivity that you’d see on sites like The Guardian or The New York Times.
World’s 100 Largest Newspapers, by circulation
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