Most news should be free. People don't want to pay to hear about current events.
just a heads up Re this comment of mine directed to you
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32076788
TY/BR
Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
131–140 of 183 posts
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try telling them you're going to prison instead. I can't imagine they'll have an inmate edition.
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 s…
It's in some county jails too.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#133Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 badge…
"I'm going in for assisted suicide tomorrow, and getting my affairs in order."
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 get a paper delivered to my door as well as magazines like Atlantic, New Yorker, and Economist. Worth every penny.
Cool! Anyways, most people don't do this because they don't read articles frequently enough, or they read from too many sources.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#136Subscribe 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.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 badge…
"I'm going in for assisted suicide tomorrow, and getting my affairs in order."
I appreciate this as darkly humorous, but there is the off chance they send the police around to check on you.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actu…
> services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards. Is there an option to create virtual "credit" cards on Privacy? I only can make debit cards.
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.
Re: Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 offerin…
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.
And, word of mouth is still a thing, which no advertising buddget can fix, when deeply bad, toxic, prevalent.