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Subscription Hell

techcrunch.com

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Re: Subscription Hell

#281

Post by ImaCake »

zenhack wrote: post #108

> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-defini…

I use firefox on mobile for ad-blocking and reader mode. Sometimes I get frustrated when firefox gets unstable and try chrome, but the lack of a proper reader mode and no way to disable ads makes half the internet completely unusable. I find it hard to believe that average chrome using consumers are doing anything more than tolerating the current state of the web.

Re: Subscription Hell

#282

Post by mythz »

Personally I love Content subscriptions, $11 /month for Netflix gives you access to their $7B in annual content budget. Google Play/YouTube Red (ad-free) is also great value at $7.99 /month (early sub pricing). Likewise I got Amazon Prime for the free shipping but they also provide access to great content in their Prime Video catalog and the 2nd Music Sub is useful for the Wife/kids.

I have a number of Software and Cloud Subscriptions which are justified as cost of doing business but they're nowhere near the value offered from Content subscriptions.

Personally I'm against subscriptions for Games or News, IMO both are time sucks that are a detrimental the more you spend playing or reading them. I'll look at an Amazon FreeTime subscription when the kids come of age because the iOS Store is a mine field of dark UX patterns designed for kids addiction to suck IAP's from parents.

Re: Subscription Hell

#283

Post by Reedx »

codazoda wrote: post #43

I don't mind subscriptions but I do fear the day when my favorite subscriptions start to run ads on top of their monthly fee.

NY Times already does. I was surprised and annoyed to still see ads when I subscribed.

Re: Subscription Hell

#284

Post by gravity_123 »

coldtea wrote: post #251
usrusr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "middle ground" has been the most common model for desktop app pricing for decades. You buy version X of a product. When the next major version is released you pay an upgrade price. Mobile app stores killed that model, when they made continuous, perpetual updates the norm. At the time, everybody was too busy pointing out the implications of going from 50$ to 50ct when the even bigger change was a farewell to ma…

> Mobile app stores killed that model, when they made continuous, perpetual updates the norm. Continuous, perpetual updates are definitely NOT the norm in mobile apps. Some get some bug-fixes and the occasional new feature, but any major update lands a version 2.0. Far more (the "long tail") are just abandoned (like all those thousands of 32-bit apps being deprecated in the iOS store).

Both apple and google don't support 'pay for upgrade' model. Its either subscription or pay once. Of course, you can roll out your own payment gateway(which apple has further issues with) or re upload the app under a new v2 name, but those are not very satisfactory solutions.

Re: Subscription Hell

#285

Post by lajhsdfkl »

ozim wrote: post #156
lajhsdfkl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing ads is unethical now? >Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down. Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?

How showing ads is against GDPR? You still can show ads, you just need consent for tracking users. If they are going out of business because of GDPR they were not just showing ads.

There are no ads without tracking.

Re: Subscription Hell

#286

Post by gnicholas »

makecheck wrote: post #177

“Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.” Oh come on, NO I do not want that! One of the biggest problems with ads, news sites and other stuff is that almost any of these “experiences”, especially with video, are a drain on data plans and implemented terribly. Give me an article . If that article has some simple images…

Yeah, not so much what consumers want as what succeeds on social media.

Re: Subscription Hell

#287

Post by JasonFruit »

zenhack wrote: post #108

> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-defini…

Mobile users and rural satellite users like me. I was also struck by:

> We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth.

I still want plain text, and I think there must be others like me — we just want to read what they have to say, which is more immersive than the ten megabytes of dreck they sent me could possibly be.

Re: Subscription Hell

#288

Post by gnicholas »

tdurden wrote: post #164

$35 a month for Bloomberg is an insane amount to ask - even if they cut that number by 90%, it is still very debatable if the content is worth the price.

I wonder if they set the price point so high so they can capture lots of revenue from businesses, like the WSJ does. Then for consumers they can offer a huge discount.

Re: Subscription Hell

#289

Post by stormbrew »

wpietri wrote: post #240
techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…

A model I really like is the one IntelliJ uses. They encourage you to buy a subscription. But when you buy a year at once, you get a "perpetual fallback license" such that you can always keep using the version that is current when you buy: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getti…

Another, maybe less flattering, way of looking at this is that you're buying or rent-to-owning the current version and then getting demo copies of updates so long as you keep paying your lease.

Re: Subscription Hell

#290

Post by h1d »

mythz wrote: post #282

Personally I love Content subscriptions, $11 /month for Netflix gives you access to their $7B in annual content budget. Google Play/YouTube Red (ad-free) is also great value at $7.99 /month (early sub pricing). Likewise I got Amazon Prime for the free shipping but they also provide access to great content in their Prime Video catalog and the 2nd Music Sub is useful for the Wife/kids. I have a number of Software and C…

Content subscription depends. I would rather just rent the few that matters and feel I got a better deal than watching 5 average ones missing out the one that looked the most interesting.
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