This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel.
But, to nobody’s surprise, the MBAs don’t like options where the user doesn’t give away money by accident.
Auto renew is one of those things that should be illegal to default users into.
The harder a service is to cancel, the more unlikely I am to ever re-subscribe.
That's something they need to start studying in business/MBA school. That SOME customer churn reduction strategies directly lead to indefinite loss of customers.
To give a specific anecdote: Ooma offers a very interesting service, hassle-free "landline" (VoIP) turn-key phone service, the price is reasonable, and they have multiple offerings to suite many needs. I wanted to use them for a specific project, but cancelling was so toxic (call to cancel, waste my time to cancel, argue to cancel, etc) that after cancelling once instead of re-subing next time like I had PLANNED I went to a competitor. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempt...
So they lost a customer for life. Verizon lost a customer for life. SiriusXM lost a customer for life. All because cancellation was a PITA. Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Why is business education so bad?
I feel like Costco, LEGO, or Ikea need to open a business school or something, just to teach a generation of people who want a business to survive a hundred years and go from one success to another. MBA education in the US feels like a "pump and dump" scheme right now.
It’s not just a stereotype it’s often their explicit job description! They get hired or promoted with a performance metric for juicing those metrics either as an expectation of the job or as a requirement for performance incentives and bonus pay…
This all of course tends to be set up by fellow MBAs higher up the corporate food chain and since everyone keeps personally profiting no one sees any reason to stop, all the dead and destroyed companies were accidents, bad decisions, acts of god, etc… never due to systemic misunderstanding of business management principles… because that might actually be something the shareholders could sue over, and no one wants that, at a primal subconscious level it’s unthinkable.
I think that corporate sponsorship of education needs of to be outlawed. We've had at least three generations of exponential feedback of antisocial principles dominating business education. Taking much longer to go hockey stick. MBAs can't keep resting on the laurels of bringing the first GI Bill gen from draft to serving technical competence to industrial relevance. For a start the foundation for the qualification is absolutely rooted in post war growth imperatives.
By the way, at some companies where you are sponsored to go there is a 90%+ acceptance rate of people into business school. It is effectively a 'backdoor' into MBA programs. They like them because the same companies come on campus to recruit and hire people back into their company. It's a nice circle to be inside, but locks others out.
I worked for a company that used A/B testing to justify call-to-cancel; makes me angry every time I think about it. I guess that's one of the tricky things about A/B testing - it is easy to measure that call-to-cancel decreases customer churn, not so easy to measure the number of people that will never sign up for your service or the number of customers that do churn and swear to never use you again.
I cancelled my years long nytimes subscription a few years ago once someone told me that they had to call in and suffer through customer service retention reps in order to cancel their sub. I just couldn't stand the thought of being bled for cash due to their making it too inconvenient for subscribers to cancel.
I used to tell the newspaper I was moving to Madagascar because they wouldn't have that on their script. Now they'll just push the electronic edition.
One of the big problems is the CSR's only have incentives to retain people now. There is no extra penalty for alienating someone from ever coming back, it's the same as a non-renew.
With the web versions of this, every app that badgers me gets a 1 star review for badgering me by insisting that I review it. Every cancellation, I select "other" and tell them I don't do business with people that hold my subscription hostage until I answer questions.
Personally, I feel there is some fraud (or some other legal term here) going on when I press a "Cancel Subscription" button and it doesn't cancel. A regular confirmation box is fine and understandable, but they can't help but change the default colors and text on those, or word them oddly to make me want to back out. Bu "cancelling" followed up by mandatory questions/answers about why I'm quitting is forcing me to work for them building their data sets without compensation. Maybe I should send them a bill.
They're piloting a tablet program in the Feds. The tablet is free. They even offer free books. Nice, right? What they don't advertise is that the system also charges something like a dollar a minute to 'use'. Wonder what those free books actually come out to costing. So far this is only in the womens prisons. I'm sure they will use it as an excuse to get rid of the actually library that inmates donate all the books sent from home to. Wrote way too much to say soon they might.
I’ve always felt like the rule should be really simple: whatever means allow you to sign up should allow you to cancel too.
The number of things I can do to modify my plans in-app - all except cancel - is not only striking, but clearly done maliciously. It’s a very deliberate decision that is easy to identify, there’s very little grey area.
Forcing people to call just to cancel is particularly evil.
> The harder a service is to cancel, the more unlikely I am to ever re-subscribe.
Adobe’s subscriptions are hell to cancel. It’s easier to cancel the credit card via the bank.
Btw, some time ago I was kinda shocked when Digital Ocean was able to charge an expired card of mine, multiple times.
The card had expired, and I had renewed it, but I didn’t have access to the DO account anymore, so I couldn’t update the card info. Somehow DO was still able to charge the expired card, and since I couldn’t access my account (and support wasn’t super helpful either), I had to contest the charge via the bank, about 5 times, until they finally cancelled the subscription and account.
> US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.
They're usually right that juicing their numbers in the short term means they can cash out with higher stock and better bonuses in the next 5 years.
There is a cliff though where if you go over it you do alienate everyone and sentiment turns against the company and it'll fail. That isn't measurable though so nobody cares, and they'll just leave and land at a different company and try to juice it as well.
But overall with every business in the country doing this, it becomes pretty toxic. You're not actually producing things that people really want, you're producing things that maximally exploit consumers.
At some point, though, does the whole culture and economy fall over that cliff and you get systemic failure?
Once you understand that most people live in a semi-conscious state because of mental overwhelm, physical frailty, and general life problems, abusive business practices such as this one, loan sharks, etc., start making a lot of sense.
At one point I lived in the greater Providence, RI area. I bought an online subscription to a big local paper [0], mainly to help support local journalism.
The subscription did give me full access to their articles. But it did nothing to eliminate the crap I really hate: interleaving of "sponsored content" with actual news, irrepressible autoplay videos, etc.
The unavoidable, usability-destroying advertising is why I cancelled almost immediately.
Credit card companies could really make a difference with helping manage subscription services. For example, they could allow you to decline future charges from certain merchants essentially cancelling your subscription. You wouldn't even have to cancel with the provider, you can cancel with the cc company.
Some credit card companies do the opposite! Apple Card will automatically provide merchants with your new card number if you order a card replacement, and you can't do anything about it. It's the reason I am no longer an Apple Card user.
You get a new card and you have to make sure you migrate over all of your subscriptions and bill-pay to the new cc. Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.
>>Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.
That's why they do it I believe. But if they pair that up with subscription management it would be nice. Interestingly they do this exact thing with App Store subscriptions. You can cancel anytime it's done through Apple, and not the service/app you subscribed to.
This doesn't bother me as much as most of the other complaints here. How else can you keep someone from creating multiple accounts to get multiple free trials?
That's an issue for a subset of SaaS products that deliver value without stickiness. Sticky products, though, should definitely not take a credit card upfront. For example, a project management product is sticky because I put my data into it and it's too much hassle to recreate that data every 14 days.
For non-sticky SaaS products, there may be a case for taking a credit card in order to prevent multiple free trials per credit card fingerprint, but there are alternatives, such as taking their phone number and sending a verification code. It's not foolproof, but it will stop the majority of free trial abuse.
It means you can't just extract some fungible value for the trial period and move on easily.
A project management system is sticky, for example, because you can't easily take all your data out of it and put it into a different project management system that has different features.
A cold outreach SaaS isn't very sticky, because you can spam people for the trial period and then move on to the next cold outreach SaaS.
I'm seeing more companies terminate accounts immediately upon cancellation, especially for free trials. This makes people back out of cancellation while it's on their mind, and then they forget to cancel before the deadline. It's a dark pattern I really wish the industry would stop pushing.
Why isn't it already illegal for cancellation to take effect right away for prepaid services without being given a prorated refund? Isn't that basically theft?
I activated the free trial for Apple Arcade because an ad for it was prominently shown in the settings app.
If you cancel the free trial, they immediately terminate the access.
But worse: they did not send an email before charging the first non-free month.
When I saw a €4.99 charge on my credit card, I canceled the trial (that I did not even use). I was disappointed about Apple using such dark patterns.
ClassPass is one example I recently ran into. I’ve already bought credits for the month and am planning to cancel my current plan, but if I do I immediately forfeit my (prepaid!) credits.
I use Privacy [1] for this. Create a new card, set max amount to $1, and move on. I always get a chuckle when I get those "Oops, looks like your payment failed" emails. It also serves as a great reminder, because in some cases I actually do renew the service (by modifying the card) if it was providing value.
The internet is full of these dark patterns. It really should be illegal to use tricky language to get people to opt into things they’re not really interested in. In this case auto renewal but often it’s sharing contact info or tracking without explicit consent.
I'm currently subscribed to something for a year because of auto renew. The subscription is something useful but was going to use a competitor but once I'd paid it they made it so painful to back out I let it go, turned off auto renew properly, and will never use them again once this one lapses.
How do things play out if you call your credit card company and say, "Please don't allow any more charges from this vendor. I'm trying to cancel but they're making it hard."?
Semi-related: If you don't want to go through the process of trying to work with your bank to refuse auto-renewal, there are services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards.
You allot a specific amount of money to one of their cards, then use that to sign up with.
It also claims to help keep your accounts a bit more safe, since if that data gets leaked, it's not your actual card number, but it's really more of centralizing the risk on Privacy's servers instead at 10 different vendors.
Ah, sorry I was using the terms interchangeably. I think it's actually a debit setup, kind of like a gift card? I've never actually used the service, just heard some reviews about it.
Yes, you hook up your bank account to Privacy and can create debit cards. You can set them up with spending limits, and can lock them to only work with the first merchant its used with for recurring expenses (if you want). You also have the option to create one time use cards as well. For what its worth, it works well, but it seems like some merchants block Privacy cards - in my case, to buy a Grubhub gift card.
It's even more in the interests of the credit card company to retain your long term business. That's why chargebacks are so frequently abused (and accepted by card issuers).
I have used my credit card company to do this, but like I say, it wasn't that I was particularly unhappy with their service, just wanted to use a competitor (grass looked greener). Ironically, the auto renew was the first real problem I'd had.
I canceled a credit card over a un-cancellable MS Office subscription. MS, all of a sudden, came back to me. After two months or so, they forgot about it and it had no impact on the other subscriptions I had at the time.
It also shows people just want to pay for a single piece of content--not an ongoing relationship. I want to buy a magazine or two off the newsstand before I sign up for a subscription.
I use virtual credit cards with a fixed expiration date precisely to avoid this issue; auto-renewing will never work no matter the shenanigans they throw at you
> This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel.
In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."
"Growth hackers" imply they're doing this for the long term, which I don't believe at all. All these strategies do is give the organization a short term bump in exchange for a negative long term reputation and customer loss.
I've literally been warned not to sub to the New York Times by random people without prompting when the newspaper was mentioned in passing. Is that "growth hacking?" They've made having a subscription a life choice because cancellation is so painful, and they have so many predatory pricing dark patterns.
I just cancelled my NYT subscription, took me 5 minutes. Trying to cancel my Wired subscription, non-US subscriber, means I have to wait for the next delivery to use a number on the envelope to identify myself in order to cancel the subscription. Well, be it I guess.
Wired is the worst. It's literally impossible to cancel online, and they still keep spamming me with "renewal notices" snail mail even after my subscription ended.
“It makes sense that sleepers churn: They aren’t getting much value from their subscription. Yet they don’t churn right away. In any given month, 90% of sleepers will simply continue to stay inactive. It’s only when they wake up again and come back that their cancellation rates soar, generally accounting for about 30% of active churn.
This makes re-engaging sleepers difficult. How do you bring them back into the fold and “wake them up” without prompting them to cancel?”
They are advising to trick users into continuing their subscription by not reminding them they are subscribed.
I am sure they are also against reminding folks when it is time to auto renew.
These are all tactics that hurt the overall subscription industry by making people not trust companies. The ethical thing to do is ensure each subscriber is subscribing by choice.
I've seen the hazards of "raise the dead" campaigns before. You send out a campaign to your inactive users and get 20% engagement. Half of those are cancellations. With 30% sleeper rate, you just immediately 3% of your users. Not fun.
What I haven't seen is an analysis of the effect on retention rate. That's going to play out over time. Some of the users who cancelled were going to anyway and some people you reactivated were saved. It would be very handy to have a formula of what values make sense to send out these campaigns so you can stomach the short term loss for the long term gain.
> These are all tactics that hurt the overall subscription industry by making people not trust companies. The ethical thing to do is ensure each subscriber is subscribing by choice.
Tragedy of the commons.
See also: taxis. Uber succeeded in part because taxi cartels had become so incredibly unlikable.
What I hate about subs for news media these days is the trend to have hidden tiers for subscribers.
Basically, you pay a monthly/yearly fee and then all of the sudden you realize that are certain publications that are Exclusive for 'Gold' members or whatever! what a scam. They took a page from the SaaS business-space.
What I really hate is that there doesn't seem to be some sort of Netflix-type subscription thing (or if there is I'm not aware of it and the subscribe now! banners blasted over everything never seem to suggest them).
If there's an interesting story in, say, the Austin local newspaper and I live in Idaho or wherever I am not bothering to subscribe to Austin's local newspaper just to see if the rest of the article is actually interesting. And sure sometimes you get three articles or whatever but even then it's insanity to subscribe.
Apple News+ or whatever it is called does this. It has a good spread of papers across the country (Houston Chronical, LA Times, Kansas City Star, etc), but obviously doesn't include the bigger publications like the NYTimes or Washington Post.
I was seriously looking into Apple News+ a few months ago, but it turns out you have to use the app (from what I remember), which of course requires an Apple device.
I only have an iPhone, and like to read news on my computer or tablet which doesn't run iOS. So that's a no-go for me :/
I haven't rerun the analysis but back in the day (ten-to-fifteen+ years ago) it was actually cheaper to subscribe to purchase new digital episodes of series you liked on Amazon VOD (at something like $2-$3/episode) rather than to pay for cable. Back then (pre-streaming) TiVo boxes would auto-download the new episodes overnight and poof there they are to watch. We are again getting to the point with subscriptions that just buying whatever content is becoming cost-effective again. The problem is that once I start bothering to hunt to buy something, it's not a lot harder to hunt for $0 versions so ethics becomes the only barrier. How much does it cost to purchase Stranger Things every few years vs pay Netflix monthly?
I'd prefer a higher subscription rate for the service. The sensation of paying for something, then paying on top of that thing is infuriating. It's like paying admission to enter a theme park, then having to pay a fee for each ride: either let me enter for free, and pay for each ride, or pay to enter, and ride for free.
Assuming a higher subscription rate would be prohibitively expensive, then yes, I would prefer no option at all.
I think you can pay to watch movies a la carte on Amazon even if you don't have a prime subscription.
Personally I've enjoyed paying for individual movies on Amazon because the selection of free movies on Prime is underwhelming. (e.g. they have all the "C" sci-fi movies)
You can change Amazon video to only show free options. A subscription that made all the rentable movies free would be prohibitively expensive. You should basically be thinking of prime video and the movie rental service as different businesses.
I mean, for a long time, when a new movie came out on iTunes, I would first check Netflix to see if it was included in my subscription, and about 50% of the time it was. You likely wouldn't get the same selection, but it would not be prohibitively expensive to have at least some of the movies available on their service.
Really the issue is that Amazon is trying to use a single app ("Prime Video") for both the Prime Video service (all-you-can-watch library of limited content) and their video storefront (a la carte purchases of a larger library). They should have split them out years ago, or at least done a better job of segmenting the two.
Completely disagree here. It's kinda like going into blockbuster used to be. You can spend $1 on the cheap movies (eg, the free ones on prime), or you want to watch a brand new major release, you spend more.
Cable has done the same thing for decades. Subscription includes a ton of free content, and you can pay more for PPV or on demand new releases.
What an odd question. I would prefer the movies that are on the service I pay for to be included in my package.
It's a different service, rentals, smashed into the service I pay for, prime "free" videos. That is what makes it frustrating. I do in fact sometimes end up renting those videos which is why they include them. But it's not a good customer experience by any means.
That's only an odd question if you assume it costs Amazon nothing to include videos in prime. So the alternatives are: a) Only free prime videos. b) Free prime videos + videos you can rent. There is no option c) All videos in the world available for free on prime. As much as you would maybe like it.
It was a great question. Contentment eludes you if you can’t recognize you have enough, while being aware more is possible. If that’s not possible, switch to a service that gives you “everything” (but costs more or has fewer titles.)
I only watch shows on Apple TV that have been recommended to me through word of mouth or on a review site so that I know it was produced for the service, precisely because the UI is so terrible with the mixing of content. 99% of the time I will have wasted part of my life looking for something interesting to watch only to find out I have to pay more money on top of the subscription.
They're handing out free subscriptions constantly to build the service, but the mixing of subscription content with pay content actively makes me use the trials less and makes me never want to pay for the service.
40% are "sleepers". Meaning nearly half of their subscription revenue is from people who forgot they had it, don't use it, and will keep getting auto-renewed until something reminds them they're paying for this thing they don't want.
When your product is so worthless and uncompelling on nearly half customers don't use it and your business model relies on them forgetting they're paying for it, then your industry is DONE.
Mainstream/Legacy newstainment is absolute garbage. Not worth your time if it is free.
> When your product is so worthless and uncompelling on nearly half customers don't use it and your business model relies on them forgetting they're paying for it, then your industry is DONE.
I think this is the model most commercial gyms operate on.
And with that let me plug the YMCA. It might vary by region, but the ones around here (PNW) are month to month payment, no sign up fees, far larger and cleaner than any LA Fitness or Planet Fitness. All around a wonderful gym option.
I'm missing something about this. What benefit do you receive? You performed work to subscribe then more work to cancel. What did you receive in return? Not service, I assume since you canceled immediately.
Most subscriptions are fixed-periods: this means that once you pay, it is non-refundable. Doesn't matter that this is illegal in Australia, NZ and EU: they only sporadically enforce it anyways. In practice, this means that
you cancel for the future subscription, not the current period.
In my experience, you buy the service in billing-cycle-length increments. E.g., if Hulu's auto-renew charges you monthly, then even if you cancel, you still have Hulu access until the next time they would have billed you.
Subscriptions have trials, or fixed periods. You take the trial, cancel to prevent auto renew and still use the trial / subscription until the period runs out.
Exactly as the others mentioned. Subscribe to Disney + for a year, cancel immediately - now I have it for a year and don’t have to think about it at all.
And when it stops working, if I notice, I can resubscribe. If I don’t notice - well then I didn’t need it anyway.
Because almost nobody offers refunds once the payment goes through, you can cancel immediately but retain access through whatever the subscription period is (usually 1 month).
Are there any publications that have tried to recreate the experience of buying a physical paper? Like pay a one time fee of $2-3 dollars and get access to all of the news from this past week? Or maybe get an additional 10 articles?
The headline is misleading; it's not just news publications.
>Email newsletters, a welcome letter from the editor, a mobile app download, podcasts, subscription benefits reminders and/or a series of reminder emails over the first week and month have all proven successful with audiences.
Nope, nope, nope to all of that. Annoying me has the opposite effect to what the MBAs want.
As someone below notes: you can go to privacy.com and set up temp credit cards, with a limited $$$ amount. They can try to auto-renew all they want, but they'll just get declined.
> you can go to privacy.com and set up temp credit cards, with a limited $$$ amount. They can try to auto-renew all they want, but they'll just get declined.
Doesn't your credit report (unfairly) take a hit if you do that, the same way it (fairly) does if you don't pay your electric bill?
Of course, privacy.com will say Yes to any name & address you give with your credit card, so you don't have to use your real PII. Or your regular email. How would that show up on your credit report?
It's easy to imagine that everything you provide is checked, but it's not true. Just the credit card number, expiration date, and security code.
In Germany, a new rule (§312k BGB) has come into effect on Jul 1st (a few days ago!), that if a provider offers people to open new contracts on the internet, the provider is also required to let customers cancel their subscriptions via a button on the website. If there is no such button, customers can cancel any time.
Yeah, The Times (UK) does this, you cannot unsub unless you call a help-line that is firewalled by Rube-Goldberg UI contraption that takes rubix cube levels of motivation to get through.
I wonder if we can (legally) fight using the same methods that the companies use.
E.g., suppose their phone system can handle 1000 people in queue + 20 live conversations. Companies keep the callers waiting, with no regard to the cost to the caller, so the company can minimize their customer-service costs.
So how about we even things up? Create company-specific automated services that call in using customer-oriented robots. Have logic that knows how to navigate each company's phone system to reach an appropriate real person. And once they reach a live customer service rep, play the message, "Thank you for your business. We value you as a vendor, and will connect you with your customer as soon as possible! Your expected wait time is...", and have them wait while this middle-man service gets your attention.
Your Call Center workers would be instructed to hang up immediately, and systems would be programmed to try to recognize that system. You have hit on something important though:
Customer call centers are generally one of the first places to be aggressively ootimized, and if you hace a call center that has long queue times, this is a powerful signal about what management really thinks is important.
Many call centers do not allow the workers to disconnect the call without going through some sort of formal procedure, so this could be exploited until that policy changes.
I'm not sure about the legalities, but some possible answers are:
a) Because the automated system will continue to call them until they connect a real person to the customer.
b) If the law is silent about which party can impose bureaucratic hassles on the other, then perhaps this system would satisfy some legal obligations.
I.e., if the law allows a business to argue, "The customer who wanted to cancel their subscription never stayed on the phone long enough tell that to our customer service rep!", then perhaps the law also allows a customer to argue, "I tried to cancel my subscription, but they kept hanging up on my voice menu system!"
Perhaps I misunderstand the law, but my (potential) pet peeve is that businesses get away with imposing time-consuming, costly friction on their customers in the form of paperwork, call-waiting time, etc. I think it would be just for customers to repay that in kind.
The experience of news subscriptions, and especially cancellations, is terrible.
Where are the pay as you go plans? I'll give your site $20, then you can debit my account some fee per article that I actually read. And no auto-renew.
Hmm, never heard of it. I was thinking more of a per-publication offering, in the same way there are per-publication subscriptions, rather than a separate aggregation service that wants to be in my Inbox all the time. I think not every article has the same value either, not sure how one gauges the value of a given article exactly.
My point really is that I'm willing to pay a reasonable price, but I'm not willing to sign up in perpetuity and I'm not willing to go through an onerous cancellation process. Treat me like a valued customer and let me buy the pieces I want. I don't really care to support parts of the paper/news I don't consume - which is what a subscription does.
> “You’ll need a thought-out plan using proven tactics to start forming habits early. Email newsletters, a welcome letter from the editor, a mobile app download, podcasts, subscription benefits reminders and/or a series of reminder emails over the first week and month have all proven successful with audiences.”
I don’t want any of that crap. I just want the articles you used to produce in print, except now through my RSS feed. The energy you put into hiring podcast consultants or generating auto play video would be better spent on reportage.
It's wild to me that the default payment plan for publications is a subscription-based model. The audacity! I'm just trying to read an article every so often, that is not worth whatever you're charging per month.
It feels like microtransactions are the appropriate model to use here, but it will likely have negative incentives (e.g., prioritize clickbait even more.) The Apple News model is also fairly promising, but unclear if publications can support their businesses with it.
I think that's a vestige of the non-digital era when you had to actually get a paper delivered to your door. Now, I'm spoiled for choice and I can read 100 articles across 100 sources easily. No way I'm paying a monthly subscription for each one!
I think you're misunderstanding. You're getting less from your scattered reading than he is from investing in a few, well-packaged publications, assuming you spend the same amount of effort reading. A regular reader of a publication gains an expertise that saves a lot of time and allows for much more reading between the lines. That's a big part of what people are paying for. It wouldn't make sense to pay for more publications than you can master, even if they cost what you'd consider a fair per-article rate. It's not really about minimizing cost per article by buying articles in bulk, especially in the digital age, as you previously noted.
I am not misunderstanding, I am telling you the reality of the situation: People don't do that. That is literally what this report is about, that "a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24 hours". They read articles sparingly across many different sources, and they will not pay for a recurring subscription across them all. Newspapers can either ignore that and slowly die out, or find more effective business models that match how people actually consume content now.
This mindset of "no, it is the people who are wrong" is completely backwards, and no amount of lecturing will make it true.
Sorry, I knew I should've headed off a tangential response about the people who don't read news. Most of them shouldn't start doing that. My comment was in response to you saying that you read 1-2 articles from a wide variety of sources and seemingly not understanding the value of concentrating that same volume of reading into fewer sources. As for newspapers in particular, the mid market is giving way to fewer paywalled papers of record, and a wider variety of periodicals.
I don't think you're listening, because the point is that these people do read the news. That's what this report is about: they read the news, but they're not willing to pay for a recurring subscription. Lecturing one person (me) about the value of subscriptions is not going to change anything. I do pay for a few subscriptions. There's just far more that I can't read because it's just not worth the monthly cost. And that's the reality of the newspaper business.
I have been reading closely. We're on a subthread started by you saying you thought it was audacious to charge a subscription for news and microtransactions are more appropriate. Now you've said you do pay for news subscriptions, which I think someone wouldn't do if they didn't understand the value, so I think we've gotten to the bottom of this.
You're missing the forest for a single tree (me). Again, the point is that there are way more publications that I want to read but I can't due to those monthly subscriptions. It is audacious for newspapers to demand recurring subscriptions, but I have no other choice, so I've picked two. This model is not sustainable, as the report demonstrates. There is a huge market that is willing to pay less than a monthly recurring subscription that is totally unaddressed.
Yes, there is also a market for paid aggregated news. Apple News+ (acquisition of Texture) is probably best known. Some obvious limitations, of course.
I have a family member who still gets the paper and I swear it's better than the online equivalent. The layout is better, and the ads are actually useful, in the sense that they are placed with the understanding that "someone looking at this content might also be interested in this", and nothing is popping up or stealing clicks.
My sense is newspapers have been totally lost in the internet era for some reason, and never figured out the basic "provide these services in this way and be nice to customers." I think these problems then trickled back to some extent with the paper versions too.
There's entire content categories (local event calendars for instance) that have essentially vanished locally in the way they used to be there.
I think it's possible to run a news organization well and my guess is there are some out there being run well but I don't think it's just your age.
This is not surprising, I got a deal with the NYT and attempted to cancel through a phone call where they extended the offer. 12 months later same call, they asked what would I need to stay and I said same offer indefinitely, 1$ a month is worth it but not much more as a European when its not my main source of news. For some reason I still prefer dead trees when I can find the time.
I prefer dead trees because they're not reporting what I'm reading, for how long nor where the cursor travels on the page. I find people recording my reading habits and preferences to be extremely dangerous given the current political climate.
The Wall Street Journal still publishes a PDF of the print version. If all papers did this, I'd have a lot less problem subscribing. Instead, they want you to use their app or log into the site.
Som eyears ago I was thinking of joining my local Equinox. A few of us went for a tour and here's what I remember most. In the lobby there were 5 "membership consultants" for signing people up. None of them were doing anything at that point. While there one of them answered a phone call. The person on the other end clearly wanted to cancel. "I'm sorry, no one can help you with that right now. You should come in tomorrow."
In my case at least it would've been a payroll deduction so I'd never have to deal with cancelling. I'd just cancel the payroll deduction (as in it was a corporate rate).
A lot of people don't like Adobe having subscription services. I actually think subscriptions are a better fit for software. You never really "own" your software as much as you think you might. You've just created an incentive for the company to bump the major version and sell you an "upgrade" while abandoning your version. Adobe did this cameras they'd support with their RAW plugin. The RAW plugin just had completely nnnecessary minimum versions to force people to upgrade.
But Adobe's subscription model sucks. You have to purchase a year minimum. There are lots of dark patterns to auto-renew. Actually cancelling is difficult.
Compare this to Jetbrains (which I pay for). When you cancel you get to use any version you've paid for in perpetuity. They send you advance notice about renewals. I'm happy to pay it.
There are a number of news publications I'd like to support but I just don't want to deal with an opaque "introductory pricing" and having to call someone to cancel. I'm not supporting such practices with my money.
I realize some MBA somewhere has done the math on new subs lost vs continuing subs they'd lose but this is a classic example of short-term thinkin gyour way into extinction.
What's needed is a credits system that works across multiple sites on the order of pay as you consume. I don't mind paying. In fact, I want to pay. Gladly.
What I don't want is to overpay and/or take on a payment agreement (i.e., subscription) that's too easy to forget about, or too difficult to cancel (i.e., dark pattern).
I mean if it's me I'm trying to read a single wsj or FT article, and there's no way to do that, so I'm unsubscribing asap as a signal to the publication to be less shitty
not entirely their fault -- the entire electronic payments system has evolved to make non in person micropayments difficult
also possible pubs aren't confident enough in the value prop of individual articles to price them
I hate virtual economies + in-game currencies but for newspapers specifically, as an alternative to subscription-gating, it might be an improvement
anonymity is also a consideration; KYC fine, but the payment processor can know who I am without telling the content vendor
The first thing i do right after buying a subscription on the AppStore, is cancel it.
It's the only way to stay in control and avoid accidentally paying for things i don't use;
I bet many people do this, for any type of subscription.
Of course. Every time I signed up for a new publication it was to be able to read one article I cared about. I didn't need the subscription after that until the next article... Which doesn't happen often.
This is almost certainly it, surprised I'm not seeing it brought up more often in this thread.
Of the 6 or so news publications I've signed up for this past year, I only actually wanted to be sent updated from one of them, signing up for all the rest just to get access to an article.
I would pay a decent chunk of money per month if I could get access to all news sources. But my news consumption is never done by going to a source. I just want to read articles linked from HN or Google News or Reddit, etc.
I need something like Spotify for news sources. Ad-free access to any content. I’ll pay for that. But I’m not going to subscribe to each source individually.
Edit: I would want a way to avoid paying for clickbait that I accidentally click on. Maybe sources could be paid per active-viewing-minute and definitely not for clicks.
My last few news subscriptions also let me sign-up online and required an email to cancel.
I don't know why someone hasn't done it yet but offer auto-renew on/off at the onset and when you log on the 1st time after expiry a popup with onceoff "top-up", with out any nagging emails or notifications along the way.
I think the subscribtions are just too expensive for a lot of people. For example, $7 a month to listen to somebody's paywalled podcast is $84 a year, just to hear that one person alone. For some people that's a drop in the bucket, but, for many, it's just too expensive. Makes more sense to subscribe once a year for a month, go through all the content, come back in a year and repeat the process.
So many newspapers want a subscription to read anything. I mean get real, if I visit your news site to get information about some unusual newsworthy event I'm not going to subscribe.
I would not mind a more à la carte purchase of individual articles or perhaps a set articles released for the day. Access to that particular/set of article(s) would need to be permanent.
But, to nobody’s surprise, the MBAs don’t like options where the user doesn’t give away money by accident.
Auto renew is one of those things that should be illegal to default users into.