"Garum Tesfaye is one of Addis Ababa's "newspaper landlords," a group of entrepreneurs in the Ethiopian capital who rent out papers to people too poor to buy them.
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"For 20 to 30 minutes, these readers can get their hands on a newspaper for a fraction of the price of having to buy it. If they keep the paper longer than their allotted rental time, they have to pay extra.
"A newspaper in Addis Ababa costs about six birr (35 U.S. cents) to buy. In contrast, it costs only 50 Ethiopian cents (less than one U.S. cent) to rent one.
"If 20 readers read this single paper at the rate of 50 cents, I will make 10 birr (about 60 U.S. cents)," says Tesfaye, whose business serves a regular customer base that visits his makeshift roadside shop each day.
"Most of the readers focus on vacancies rather than regular news," Tesfaye says."
...
"For 20 to 30 minutes, these readers can get their hands on a newspaper for a fraction of the price of having to buy it. If they keep the paper longer than their allotted rental time, they have to pay extra.
"A newspaper in Addis Ababa costs about six birr (35 U.S. cents) to buy. In contrast, it costs only 50 Ethiopian cents (less than one U.S. cent) to rent one.
"If 20 readers read this single paper at the rate of 50 cents, I will make 10 birr (about 60 U.S. cents)," says Tesfaye, whose business serves a regular customer base that visits his makeshift roadside shop each day.
"Most of the readers focus on vacancies rather than regular news," Tesfaye says."
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3 comments:
A newspaper in Addis Ababa costs about six birr (35 U.S. cents) to buy. In contrast, it costs only 50 Ethiopian cents (less than one U.S. cent) to rent one
That doesn't actually make sense.
For yes there are 100 sentim to a birr.
The 6 birr is 35 cents is about right (17 birr to the dollar). But 35 cents divided by 12 (2x 50 cents to each of 6 birrs) leaves us with 3 cents per read, not less than one.
It's jmust not even internally consistent.
Something's clearly wrong, because 20 reads isn't enough to make a profit if the rental price is less than 1/35th the purchase price. If the reads were actually 3 US cents instead of 1 US cent (as per Tim), it would make that part of the story consistent.
Note, by the way, that when Tesfaye says he'd make 10 birr from 20 reads, he's talking about revenues, not profits--unless he gets the paper for free.
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