The real puzzle is why anyone subscribes in the first place.
exactly this. I'm surprised 2/3 of subscribers don't cancel as well.
Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
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Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#42Subscribe and cancel is what I do with anything that doesn’t let me turn off auto-renew.
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.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#44What 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 a…
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#45Are 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?
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#46This 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.
If you replace MBAs with Growth Hackers I agree fully.
"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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#47Subscribe and cancel is what I do with anything that doesn’t let me turn off auto-renew.
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.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#48Subscribe and cancel is what I do with anything that doesn’t let me turn off auto-renew.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#49Subscribe and cancel is what I do with anything that doesn’t let me turn off auto-renew.
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.
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).
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The law should take care of dark patterns like this.
Agree one hundred percent!