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Your newest source for magazine subscriptions? It could be the USPS

Eliza Kern — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:23:16 +0000

It is a peculiar proposal to help save two struggling industries – Columbia Journalism Review reports that the United States Postal Service (USPS) is considering selling magazine subscriptions on its website and in stores through QR codes as part of a plan to bolster excitement around the mailbox.

Documents from the Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) in May show that the industry perception is that magazines arriving in mailboxes is one of the few exciting “mail moments” left for postal service customers. So encouraging magazine subscriptions could boost enthusiasm for the struggling postal service, which mainly relies on so-called “junk mail” to stay afloat, materials that aren’t quite as exciting for customers on the receiving end.

The news was first reported by the blog Dead Tree Edition, which raised some important questions about the proposal, including:

Would include both print and digital subscriptions?
Would it be an unfair use of the postal service’s resources to compete against companies like Amazon or subscription sellers?
How would publishers get their magazines into the program?

Neither the USPS or MTAC responded to requests for comment. It’s still just a proposal, but CJR reports some subscription offerings could appear in stores as early as January as part of a preliminary test, and publishers have shown interest in participating:

“The plan is for the Postal Service to install posters with QR codes in post offices around the country. Customers could then scan the code with their phones and subscribe to different magazines. Alternatively, they could just subscribe to magazines online, through USPS.com.

“What periodicals lack in volume, though, they make up for in influence. People want to receive periodicals, so they check their mail and read the spam. If magazines die, then people may not even bother to check their mailboxes. Internally, the Postal Service refers to periodicals as “the anchor in the mailbox.” Clearly, the Postal Service has an interest in making sure that periodicals stay in business and continue to sell print subscriptions.”

There’s no doubt that the promise of the arrival of a print copy of the New Yorker might entice me to the mailbox more often, but that doesn’t mean the USPS is necessarily the best company to sell me that subscription, or that QR codes on in-store posters would be an effective way to do it.

QR codes have tricky adoption issues, and plenty of customers find them confusing or unhelpful. And with 87 percent of magazine and newspaper publishers putting out iPad apps and focusing on the digital future, doing deals with the postal service seems like an odd move. But hey, if the program works, new customers are new customers — and both the postal and magazine industries could use them at the moment.

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Netflix Loses Big In Postage Increase

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:11:18 +0000

Netflix could be a big loser in the United States Postal Service’s plan to hike postage rates and overcome a potential $7 billion shortfall. The proposed increase would raise the rates that Netflix pays to ship DVDs to its customers, and could cost the company an additional $50 million a year.

According to the USPS, the rate hike would boost the cost of shipping most packages by 5.6 percent on average. But the increase varies depending upon what’s being shipped: The agency is proposing an eight percent increase for mailing periodicals, a 23 percent increase for standard mail parcels and a seven percent increase for media or library mail. The latter is the category that Netflix would most likely fall into.

A seven percent increase might not sound like a lot, but it could have a severe impact on Netflix’s business. While DVD-by-mail is not growing as quickly as Netflix’s streaming video service, it still accounts for the majority of the firm’s cost of goods sold (COGS). According to a presentation on the company’s job site, Netflix expects its COGS to be $1.4 billion in 2010, with more than half of that going towards postage and handling. With the DVD rental firm spending more than $700 million on postage and handling a year, a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that its postage costs could increase by $50 million if the USPS proposal goes through.

That’s bad news for Netflix, as increased postage costs will eat into the company’s earnings next year. For fiscal 2009, Netflix earned $115.9 million, or $1.98 per share, and it expects to earn between $132 million and $144 million for the full year 2010.

One variable that this doesn’t take into account is the postal service’s plan to cut Saturday service delivery. As part of its cost reduction plan, USPS expects to move from a six-day delivery schedule per week to five days, a move it says could lower overall costs by more than $3 billion in the first year implemented. With a decreased delivery schedule, Netflix could see the number of DVDs it ships decrease slightly, but it’s not clear how that would affect its overall costs.

The rate increase comes as Netflix has been de-emphasizing its DVD business while growing its streaming catalog. The company has spent the last several months striking deals with movie studios that push back the availability of new releases through its DVD-by-mail business by 28 days, while at the same time adding new content to its streaming library. That strategy appears to be paying off, as Netflix saw its total subscriber numbers increase by 34 percent year-over-year in the first quarter. Even so, the DVD service continues to be a robust (and costly) business for Netflix; the company sees its DVD-by-mail service continuing to grow until 2013, at which point Netflix expects it to peak.

The USPS rate increase was designed to help boost revenues and fend off huge losses at the flailing government agency, but the price proposal still needs to get final approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission. The rate hike would be the first increase in two years, and if approved, would not go into effect until January 2, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Scott Feldstein.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Slow and Steady, Netflix Pulls Ahead in Streaming Video (subscription required)

Smart Grid Firm GridPoint Goes Postal

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:36:44 +0000

Smart grid firm GridPoint says it has scored a deal to provide its energy management system to potentially 2,250 United States Postal Service locations in the U.S. USPS needs all the help it can get when it comes to reducing costs, and has been working on reducing energy use in its facilities by 30 percent by 2015. Using GridPoint’s energy management tools, USPS will be able to track, monitor and manage the energy consumption in its buildings.

A year ago GridPoint bought up stealthy Canadian energy management startup Lixar SRS, which had developed software to help businesses and consumers manage energy use. Lixar’s interface and design had gotten praise from its users, and at the time of the acquisition GridPoint said it would use the Lixar tool to “enhance its enterprise-class software.”

Buying up energy management players has become a bit of a trend for the larger smart grid infrastructure companies. Wireless network player Silver Spring Networks acquired Greenbox, and demand response company EnerNOC has bought up five various energy management startups.

For GridPoint, and these other smart grid firms, a contract like the one with USPS is a solid win. The organization has thousands of locations across the U.S., which means more sales, but also an interesting test bed to pilot the system at similar sites but with different geographies (energy consumption trends can be very regional). USPS has also been experimenting with green cars, and Bright Automotive, which makes a plug-in hybrid car called the IDEA, has a contract to retrofit a standard postal service fleet vehicle with its electric drive train and test the vehicle in Washington, D.C., for a year.

For more research on smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry

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Image courtesy of CarbonNYC’s photostream.

Find a Mailbox, Post Office, or UPS Location With MailboxMap

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:00:52 +0000

I do a lot of my correspondence electronically, but sometimes I still need to mail a letter. I know where the blue US Postal Service mailboxes are in my neighborhood, but it’s getting harder to find pickup locations when I’m on the road, since USPS has removed over half of its boxes in the past 20 years.

So I’m pleased that I’ve discovered MailboxMap. It’s a simple web site built around a Google Maps mashup. Just enter an address or zip code, and it will display a map showing the locations of mailboxes in the neighborhood. Click on a mailbox icon, and it will display pickup times.

MailboxMap also shows post offices and UPS locations, complete with hours. And there’s a mobile version, which has the advantage of displaying search results in a list, making it easier to skim for late pickups. It would be nice, though, if one could search for, say, pickups after 3:00 pm, or for Saturday pickups.

It’s not a perfect service; for example, it locates Seattle’s downtown post office on the wrong side of the street. Google Maps itself locates the same address correctly, so it’s unclear what the problem is. Nevertheless, MailboxMap is a useful service.

The site has been around for a couple of years, but it seems to be up to date, as it shows a recent pickup time change for my local box. It’s probably too much to hope that USPS will buy this site and add it to usps.com.

How often do you mail letters?

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Daily Sprout

Josie Garthwaite — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:42 +0000

Climate Change and Cali Wildfires: “To the average person a 1-degree rise in average spring and summer temperatures may not seem like much. But for residents of the western United States—including California, which is fighting at least eight fires right now—it could mean a staggering increase in the extent and cost of fires.” — Climate Progress

EU Bids Adieu to Incandescent Bulbs: When the U.S. starts phasing out incandescent light bulbs in 2012, the transition will likely look like the one taking place now in Europe, where a ban on incandescent bulbs has just taken effect. — TNR’s The Vine

Musk on Valley Girl: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk appears on the first episode of the pinked-out Valley Girl Show’s new season, talking about his triplets and goal of making millions of cars in ten years. — The Valley Girl Show via AutoblogGreen

ReVolt Seeks $30M in Stimulus Funds: Switzerland-based battery developer ReVolt Technology, working on rechargeable zinc-air batteries for electric vehicles, plans to request $30 million in grants from the Department of Energy for a manufacturing center in Portland, Oregon. — Press Release

V2G to Go Postal?: Broad use of electric vehicles in the U.S. Postal Service delivery fleet would be operationally feasible, according to a new study from the USPS Office of the Inspector General, but due to the Postal Service’s current financial distress, government funds and vehicle-to-grid revenue would likely be needed to make this transition economically feasible. — Green Car Congress

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Don't Blame the Web for Postal Service Woes

Jordan Golson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:10:35 +0000

The United States Postal Service is in dire straights. The second-largest employer in the country (behind only Wal-Mart) is facing a massive fiscal crunch amid falling mail volumes and rising expenses. The GAO estimates total mail volume will fall to 175 billion pieces in 2009, a massive, unprecedented drop to levels not seen in more than 15 years. In a release today, the USPS blamed the drop on the “trend of letter mail and business transactions being replaced with electronic alternatives” and anticipated “continued downward pressure into coming years.” In other words, email is killing the USPS. But it’s not that simple.

Surely more business is being done online, but there is no correlation between Internet adoption rates and a drop in mail — both have been generally rising over the past 15 years, at least until mail service fell off a cliff over the past few months. It’s likely that the Internet is playing a role, but I don’t think all the blame can be placed on technology. A look at the history of total mail volumes shows that declines around recession years are not uncommon, with particularly large drops occurring in the 1930s.

Additionally, the service’s package delivery competitors, like FedEx and UPS, don’t show a comparable drop in revenue, though it’s not a great comparison as those company’s routes have traditionally been more profitable than the Postal Service’s — plus, as a publicly traded company, FedEx has more of an obligation to be profitable than the government-run USPS. Though, as one of the few legal monopolies, shouldn’t the post office, with no competitors in most of its market (federal law states the USPS is the only organization that can deliver “non-urgent” letters like First Class and bulk mail), be able to make a profit? So we leave it up to you, dear readers. Why is the Postal Service in such a state?

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Postage printing on Mac

Josh Pigford — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:00:35 +0000

I currently run a small urban vinyl toy shop where we run all of the shipment processing from mac-based software.

At the moment we exclusively use USPS for all shipping (both domestic and international), and lucky for us there is some software that helps streamline that entire process.

Endicia for Mac provides an interface for calculating, weighing, printing postage, and a few dozen other things. It has probably cut package processing time in half (if not more).

What has really be fantastic is that it will fill in all the various customs forms for you instead of having to hand write it all yourself which not only helps cut down on time but helps eliminate mistakes.

We use Endicia in conjunction with a DYMO LabelWriter 400 to quickly print off postage, delivery confirmation, and address labels.

A couple of other highpoints:

Discounted domestic and international postage (up to 8% in some cases)
Automatic Address Verification – Helps avoid mistyped addresses
Mailing Log – Very useful when needing to find a previously shipped package
Bulk postage payment – Purchase your postage upfront in “bulk” instead of having to pay one transaction at a time
AppleScript integration

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