Quote from: steveinthecity on March 17, 2023, 09:23:19 PMI was thinking about this recently when placing pre-orders.  The $9.99 Digest will still cost me $6.99 after discount, and that just doesn't seem worth it.  I haven't done any real study or drilled down the price per unit vs. inflation, etc., but the price point is off-putting to where I'm not really interested.  I don't see how the Digests can be any sort of impulse buy with such a high retail tag.

I recently flipped through some of the digests at my local Publix recently out of curiosity. They're no longer in the front checkout area; they're shoved back with the magazines in a certain aisle of the store.

Anyway, I decided to count the total number of story/puzzle/quiz/fashion pages to see what customers would actually be getting for their money. 177 pages was the total in each digest that I checked. That works out to $0.0564406779661017 per page at the full retail price of $9.99 (not including sales tax) and $0.0394915254237288 per page at the $6.99 price point that you mentioned.

I just decided to count the pages in World of Betty and Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #1, which came out at the beginning of 2021. 177 pages. At $7.99, that works out to $0.0451412429378531 per page.

So Archie Comics has increased the price by $1 two years in a row but hasn't increased the content.

That's still better than the $0.1995 per page for a new $3.99 floppy or the $0.1495 per page for a $2.99 reprint floppy with one new 5-page story in it.

So Brian Hibbs' NPD Bookscan chart column covering 2022 recently came out. I spent a few hours reading it. Archie wasn't mentioned. I asked him a few questions in a comment, and he confirmed the chart doesn't cover periodicals (such as digests). As in 2021, the top-selling Archie title in the bookstore market in 2022 was "80 Years of Christmas", and it sold "just over" 1,500 copies (basically around a 50% decrease from 2021).

I wonder what happened after 1968 that brought sales of Archie comics down a spiral.
On one side, I think one of the main issues that the comic book market has right now is that it targets old readers and does not cultivate new readers. Even the idea that you have to go to a comic book store to find new periodicals and that most of the comic book stores are places for adults is not good for the market.

Same thing that happened to the sales of every other comic book publisher after 1968. Retailers didn't want to devote their precious display space to comics, because the profit margin was so low, and that display space could better be used for items that generated more profit for the space it took to display it. The profit margin on digest comics was higher, and they took up correspondingly less display space, so those were able to hang in there with retailers much longer.

Quote from: botolo on August 06, 2023, 09:15:32 PMI wonder what happened after 1968 that brought sales of Archie comics down a spiral.
On one side, I think one of the main issues that the comic book market has right now is that it targets old readers and does not cultivate new readers. Even the idea that you have to go to a comic book store to find new periodicals and that most of the comic book stores are places for adults is not good for the market.

I would think retail price is additionally a problem when it comes to getting comics into younger reader's hands.

Quote from: steveinthecity on August 07, 2023, 04:26:43 PM

Quote from: botolo on August 06, 2023, 09:15:32 PMI wonder what happened after 1968 that brought sales of Archie comics down a spiral.
On one side, I think one of the main issues that the comic book market has right now is that it targets old readers and does not cultivate new readers. Even the idea that you have to go to a comic book store to find new periodicals and that most of the comic book stores are places for adults is not good for the market.

I would think retail price is additionally a problem when it comes to getting comics into younger reader's hands.

Absolutely. The Kindle editions are a bit cheaper, but I think most parents getting Archie material for their kids would just download a ton of free samples. I can't imagine a parent paying full price for a physical digest for their kid.

That's taking a pretty long view of the asked-about "after 1968"...

Inflation didn't happen overnight, but a retailer doesn't care about your desire for cheap entertainment, he cares about how much money he makes when he sells you an item. If he has to make less profit per unit, he better know for sure he can make more money by selling LOTS of units.