Hey, did you hear you can get the Sunday Pioneer Press home-delivered for a buck?

Not per issue.

Per year.

But wait, that's not all! You can get two years for two bucks. And not just the Sunday paper, but Friday's as well.

That's right — for just 100 more cents than you fork out for the PiPress website, you can hold newsprint in your hands two days a week. (They also throw in the Monday through Thursday electronic edition.)

But before you rush out and plunk down your single, there's a catch: the deal is for Dakota County subscribers only, according to the order-taker I spoke with this morning. I'm awaiting more details from PiPress management, but this is likely a new-subscriber deal for a limited time.

Still, in recent years, the PiPress has bragged about its circulation numbers, which have remained steady while competitors' fell. Each oh-so-skinny semi-annual gain prompts muttering that the St. Paul paper is gaming the system, but they've never run afoul of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which monitors the numbers.

For newspapers, circulation is never a profit center; advertisers value "paid circ" as a measure of reader loyalty. Theoretically, the more paid subscribers, the higher the ad sales, especially on Sunday.

However, there's a point of diminishing returns. Currently, ABC doesn't count a subscription as paid if it's less than 25 percent of the base price — which the buck-a-year-deal almost certainly is. But on April 1, that changes: just a penny per subscription will count as paid, according to a tentative deal approved by the ABC board.

The rules will also obscure how much circulation is discounted. Currently, ABC reports break out 50-75 percent discounts. (Again, anything over 75 percent isn't considered paid.) In the future, such figures won't be divulged publicly, unless 5 percent or more of your total circulation was discounted 75 percent or more.

(Media buyers will have password-protected access to deeper data, says ABC communications manager Kammi Altig.)

In recent years, some analysts have argued that dailies should stop charging, distributing papers for free to get higher-revenue print ads into more hands. It's how weeklies often do it, but never dailies. Still, at least for some PiPress subscribers, that day — save for a buck or two — has come.