It was football day so I really didn't want to get into it. Now it's not so I'll respond to your point, which is well-taken.

About the metric:

I wasn't clear on the sense in which I think "price per page" is dubious. From the consumer standpoint it's not irredeemably flawed; $-per-word is better (gets at the same point more accurately) but that'd take actual work to calculate so it's not going to show up in one of these essays.

That said it has some weaknesses, mainly variations on the "Fallacy of Division".

The major dubiousness as a consumer metric is it runs the risk of double-counting "quality" when applied to the nonfiction written word: you can have a better article either by better writing or by being longer + more comprehensive. Within the constraints of magazine writing you'll see a narrow band of variation in "writing style", leaving "length/comprehensiveness" as the major source of one article's "better quality content" when compared to some other article. Thus the risk of double-counting: if a 10000-word article A on Edo-period Japan is better than a 2500 word article B on Edo-period Japan mainly b/c of how much more nuanced and detailed it is, you double count when you:

- praise A for the higher quality of its contents (thoroughness/nuance/etc.) when compared to be B

- praise A for also giving you more to read than there is in B

...which won't ruin the metric but is an easy way to overstate a case. SHORT VERSION: "local" content quality (at the word or page level) is heavily dependent on the overall quality of the larger item it's a part of (the article); when you say "this awesome 10 kiloword article has 10000 awesome words in it" you double-count the awesomeness.

This isn't enough to sink PG's thesis but it is a danger to be aware of when naively applying the metric.

What sinks his thesis is that I can throw evidence that "quality of content" does impact the price people are willing to pay; his example of newsstand pricing is more about the extent to which magazine retailers can "tax" retail magazine purchasers than about the underlying economics.

The various and sundry evidence for "quality of content" impacting price:

- subscriptions (which cut out the middleman) clearly have what he deems "better content" priced at a marked premium to inferior content; perhaps "newsstands" are just a pathological retail channel?

- the subscription price also gives nice upper bounds on publication costs; these are pretty tiny (rounding in a way prejudicially to my argument: 50 pages per issue and 50 issues per year of time magazine => .8c/page; given the similar production values of the economist we can safely assume it's similar). I'll say more on this later.

- the consumer price per unit of content varies widely between genres. Look at "Parabola", a new-agey magazine: it's 9.50 / issue at the newsstand, is always 128 pages, and is printed on 5"x8" paper. When you correct for page size you get ~17c per "page" (really: per 8.5x11" paper's worth of printed words). Do you have an explanation for why content-units of "Parabola" sell for higher prices than content-units of the economist other than some difference in the quality of their contents? If time and the economist selling for ~8.x cents per page @ the newsstand is evidence of the market value of their content why is this not evidence for the market value of "Parabola"

I can do this all day: prices per content unit vary much more widely than the narrow range PG's anecdote suggests; this is true @ the subscription price and @ the newsstand price. You'll neither find find consistent cost-per-page to cost-of-product multipliers nor will you find that going super heavypaper + glossy ink (with concomitant jump in cost-per-page) has any obvious impact on cost of product either (cf vogue or seventeen or W).

After awhile occam's razor will suggest: "newsstand" prices aren't good measurements of magazine prices (compared to subscriptions); regardless of where you measure different types of content sell at different prices per unit of content; likeliest explanation is that quality of content has a lot to do with what price something sells at (which is why there aren't any $20 weekly newsmagazines).

Additionally: publishers are already quite close to the post-medium world, in the sense that their costs-of-publication are already quite small vis-a-vis price.

An alternative explanation for the phenomenon PG is observing is something like:

- (a) each type of content will fetch a different price; this price has a lot to do with what the content is

- (b) for a given "type" of content there's a constraint on what is involved in producing an instance in it; eg: there are no 300 or 500 page newsweeklies, but there are 50-100 page newsweeklies

- (c) within each "type" prices will cluster around some central point but higher quality content will fetch higher prices

- (d) within the constraints of the genre there's a strong correlation with longer == better

- (e) together, (b) (c) and (d) make it look roughly like the time + economist situation: 'economist > time but priced < time per content unit'

...but b/c publishing costs are such a small part of the price to consumer (which has more to do firstly with content genre and secondly with relative quality of content within genre) the "length" as such isn't a big factor in setting price; the relationship described in (e) is literally a red herring.

You can differentiate this scenario from pg's by checking across content genres; if prices-to-consumer are hovering within a narrow range per unit price his looks better, but if price per content unit vary widely across genres mine looks better.