<i>At The Times, we realised that converting customers who paid £8&#x2F;week for the printed newspaper into customers paying £2&#x2F;week for the digital edition (often after paying Apple £500 for an iPad on which to read the edition) wasn’t great business. ... So — over two years — we gradually raised the price for those original customers to £6&#x2F;week. </i><p>The problem with &quot;do not talk about pricing&quot; is that you&#x27;re assuming your customers are idiots.  There&#x27;s nothing wrong with having a bunch of profitable idiots as customers, but that&#x27;s not quite the target audience for a product like newspapers.  The simple fact is that the <i>cost</i> of delivering volume to subscribers (one more subscriber) is so teeny tiny small that inflating the price more than a reasonable amount (when in fact you&#x27;re losing advertising eyeballs) is what&#x27;s not smart business.  Companies that presume I&#x27;m an idiot don&#x27;t get my business.<p>You cannot talk about pricing without talking about cost.  Intelligent businesses are unafraid to be transparent with their variable costs (which for a digital-only newspaper are significantly less than for a print version); what trips prices is the bulky overhead fixed costs:  CEO and executive management pay, benefits, and unnecessarily swanky office space.<p>Realtors are probably the best example of this IRL, operating in an industry that &quot;doesn&#x27;t want you to talk about pricing&quot; (e.g. negotiated commission at an hourly rate, for example) ... just sign on the dotted line and let them abscond with all your equity in a lump sum payment.