Amazon can now be your newspaper delivery guy, at least in a couple of cities in Spain: Customers in Madrid can now request copies of El Pais, the country’s largest newspaper, from Amazon Prime Now, the company’s free two-hour delivery service.
El Pais planned a few different things to market the new offering. Between April 23 and April 27, Amazon customers automatically got free copies of El Pais and Cinco Dias (the weekday business publication from El Pais parent company PRISA Noticias) with each Prime Now order they placed. From April 28 through May 14, they can get free copies of the papers by adding them to their shopping carts. Once that promotion ends, customers will pay the newsstand price. The metropolitan area of Barcelona will be added in coming weeks.
If you need news quickly, why not just go online? If you like to read the paper in print, why not just get regular home delivery? A third question I had, “If you need a paper that badly, why not just go out and buy one?” was a little silly, I realized on further consideration — it’s the appeal of not having to go out and get it yourself, duh, which is the appeal of online shopping in general and fast services like Prime Now, specifically. Still, for whatever reason, this appeal is less obvious when applied to a newspaper than it is when applied to some other kind of small, inexpensive product. (I’ve had a $3 baby thermometer delivered, but it wasn’t as if there was an online alternative I could use.)
But this isn’t about replacing home delivery, said Pedro Zuazua Gil, PRISA Noticias’ director of communications. “It’s not a matter of preferring one to the other. We believe they are complementary services,” he said. Newsstands and subscriptions work well, but “we have closed this deal to reach a new segment of clients.”
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