HT Mini: Perfectly Price Elastic Newspaper

By Somya Barpanda

I commute to college via the metro rail daily. Some months back, Hindustan Times (HT) came up with a daily newsletter “HT Mini” for the “people on the move”. This 4-6 page light HT publication, featuring Campus News, Light spicy University Gossip, some Current Affairs and an Agony Aunt column, was targeted at the student-commuters of the Delhi University Metro Station (Vishwavidyalaya) in North Campus. For one whole month, the copies of “HT Mini” were distributed free of cost to everybody. This was a natural way to promote and publicise this new HT product which sought a strong readership base among all college-goers who took the metro towards their residences daily.

Given the aam junta’s known liking for anything that is given away for free, the HT Mini copies became quite a rage among the students. Everyone could be seen reading one while travelling homeward from college. People would voluntarily reach out for the copies at the DU Metro Station as they found it to make for an entertaining read during their journeys.
The “HT Mini” publishers must have been quite happy with the positive response. Till now, all revenues from the publication were solely sourced from print-advertisements. But the tremendous popularity of the product encouraged the publishers to finally price the newsletter. “HT Mini” was to now sell for a nominal fee of Rupee 1.

The day when HT Mini went from ‘being given free’ to ‘being sold at Rupee 1’, it lost the ‘cult status’ it had acquired and thus began its days of getting ‘cold shouldered’ by the very public which had hitherto adored it. In simple words, the quantity demanded for HT Mini dropped drastically. On the first day after the price of Rupee 1 was announced, I asked the vendor about the number of copies he had sold and he replied glumly, “sirf teen-chaar…”! Later that day, towards the evening, the spare copies of the day’s edition had to be given away for free only.

Why such a fall from a quantity demanded in hundreds to just 3-4 copies despite a mere price rise of Rupee 1? What explains this drastic change in quantity demanded for “HT Mini” for a mere 1- rupee pricing is its demand curve which can be deemed as PERFECTLY ELASTIC. A slight change in price from 0 to 1, made the quantity demanded take a plunge i.e. at a price of zero, infinite quantities of the newsletter could be distributed (there were hundreds of takers) but when the price became Rupee 1, people stopped demanding it altogether (the 3-4 copies getting sold post the pricing can almost be equated to quantity demanded falling to zero).

The horizontal blue line in the following graph represents the perfectly elastic demand curve for HT Mini in whose case an infinitesimal increase in price (from Po = Re. 0 to P’= Re. 1) leads to a huge fall in quantity demanded (almost from infinity to zero):

There could be several explanations for the demand curve (of the good in question) being of the perfectly elastic nature. May be “HT Mini” was not as lucrative to the commuters to stop by, take the effort to scrounge for a 1-rupee-coin in their wallets and buy it. Till it was being conveniently handed over to them free-of-cost, all was well and good. But the pricing made the HT product lose its sheen. The seemingly low 1-rupee price entailed an additional cost of giving up on the “convenience that came with a free- HT Mini”.
Nowadays, HT Mini seems to have disappeared from the Vishwavidyalaya Metro Station’s premises.