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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#561

Post by pascalxus »

Strictly speaking as a consumer, I would rather pay per article (say 10c-20c per article), rather than a monthly subscription. The way I look at it, I'm giving to the media outlet partly as an act of charity, to help out for better journalism. I don't want another subscription, that's for sure.

As for cable, i pay 0$, because I don't need it, at all.

Cell phone bill is 23$/month for 2 people, using USmobile.com You get 100minutes and 100 MB of Data and 100 text messages per month. I don't need all those data hungry apps anyway.

Car insurance: metromile.com lets you pay roughly 2c - 3c per mile plus about 15$/mo base. That's much better than 100$ per month.

Who the heck wants all this? "all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. ", " Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format." Is this really what the majority of people want?

I'd gladly have a simple page with simple graphics with a nice readable layout. that last thing i want is some stupid video playing in the middle of the page, slowing things down.

Re: Subscription Hell

#562

Post by falsedan »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #436

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned foreigners or children. As an immigrant, it's not possible for me to get a credit card, only a debit card. When I was under 18, it was also very difficult to do online shopping (I just made Christmas & birthday lists and asked my parents to eBay things for me then). Every time I change country, which has happened 13 times and counting, I lose access to whatever services I had enjoy…

You can get pre-paid/secured credit cards in a lot of countries (especially if Capital One operate there). Unless you're moving every 6 months, you should have enough credit history to land one CC with a tiny limit: then you set up automatic payments and let it mature.

May I suggest setting up a project board when you move with stuff like 'update address for ' & clone all the issues when you move? Helps to avoid accounts getting closed for missed payments at least.

Re: Subscription Hell

#563

Post by falsedan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #503
nickjj wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked through the table of contents for that 1,088 page book and I didn't see anything that hinted on how to do sorting on table columns. And this is exactly why Rails Casts was great. You would Google "how do I sort table columns in Rails" and find the episode, watch it in about 10 minutes and implement it in your code base. Rails Casts has been dead for years and it still ranks in the top 3 today on Google for t…

> I don't want to flip through 1,000 pages in a book to find 1 specific feature I am struggling with right now. I may never find it. I'd much rather do that than watch a video about it, where I'm forced to scrub back and forth trying to understand the key concept at the speed the presenter is speaking instead of reading a section multiple times (which can be much faster).

1.5x playback speed, friendo

Re: Subscription Hell

#564

Post by archagon »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #119
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…

I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis. Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel. I'd expect prompting u…

If you could click a button that says "5¢ to Read" and have it work immediately, I think the problem would be solved. But this would either require some sort of browser-based wallet or a wider adoption of cryptocurrency.

Re: Subscription Hell

#565

Post by Woofles »

pascalxus wrote: post #561

Strictly speaking as a consumer, I would rather pay per article (say 10c-20c per article), rather than a monthly subscription. The way I look at it, I'm giving to the media outlet partly as an act of charity, to help out for better journalism. I don't want another subscription, that's for sure. As for cable, i pay 0$, because I don't need it, at all. Cell phone bill is 23$/month for 2 people, using USmobile.com You g…

Maybe I'm alone here, but I feel like pay per article is going to discourage readership. It now takes the one time decision (aka signing up for the subscription) and makes it into a decision that happens every time you open the site.

There's also a breakeven point with metromile (Google Fi, etc) and a standard subscription. If I recall correctly, they are targeting people who don't drive very frequently, which isn't what I'd imagine publications would want to do.

Re: Subscription Hell

#566

Post by chii »

sokoloff wrote: post #486
chii wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now, you have v3. The bundling will grow exponentially!

It’s quadratic, not exponential. For N versions, you have prices: N * (N + 1) / 2 It is likely that you could reduce to something approaching an upper bound of 2*N, as with version 8 out, you can drop support for a discounted upgrade from v2 to v4.

I stand corrected!

Re: Subscription Hell

#567

Post by vel0city »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #334
rolleiflex wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that always rubbed me wrong about this is that, logically speaking, if you buy a license for a year, the perpetual fallback license should be the version you had at the end of the license, not the one that was on the market at the beginning of it. It doesn't really make sense the way they do it, and it feels like a particularly hamfisted attempt to grab an almost negligible amount of money, so I'm puzzled.

Slightly off topic, but semi related. My parents had a one year membership at Costco. The level where you get some percentage back. I think it was 2%. Long to short, the "rebate" was paid ~60 days prior to the end of the 12 months. The remaining 60 days' purchased will only be rebated if they renew. I presume this is in the small print somewhere. None the less, it's complete crap.

That's strange, as that was not my experience not long ago. I'm thinking there was some miscommunication about the rebate with your family.

I received my rebate after I had let my membership lapse without any issue. You can use the rebate even without an active membership. You can even walk up to the customer service counter and get your rebate amount in cash if you want. I ended up getting pizza and took the rest as cash back.

Re: Subscription Hell

#568

Post by vel0city »

AlexandrB wrote: post #492
always_good wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…

> One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. This logic applies to literally any one-time purchase that includes a warranty, yet the consumer goods sector has managed it somehow. What's really happening is a deterioration of th…

You're exposed to pretty serious security vulnerabilities if you're still using a 10-year-old version of WinRAR to unrar/unzip/uncompress files you get from the internet.

Re: Subscription Hell

#569

Post by carapace »

tallanvor wrote: post #458
carapace wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that "micropayments" weren't even mentioned in this article leads me to dismiss it. There still doesn't seem to be a "Twitter of Micropayments" yet. Gratipay shut down, (RIP) https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981?gi=54bc4ed25327 Patreon takes a percentage, which, to me, seems unjustifiable.

So how should Patreon pay for their staff, infrastructure, and other costs if taking a percentage is unjustifiable?

They could add up all their expenses, divide by the number of users, and charge that?

My point is they should charge in proportion to the service/value they provide, not in proportion to the size of donation/patronage.

It doesn't cost them twice as much to process a donation twice as large, so: "unjustifiable".

Can you justify that? (Not rationalize it, justify it?)

Re: Subscription Hell

#570

Post by tedyoung »

csydas wrote: post #238
siidooloo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its going to be a real problem for Adobe. Their biggest apps (PS/AI/IND) haven’t had real upgrade worthy updates in years. Competing apps like Affinity Photo are pretty much 1 to 1 replacements. Eventually some significant portion of Adobe’s core users are going to go elsewhere.

It's not even that - they basically are back to just the isolated professional market now as the majority of built-in apps do many of the enhancements that the cheaper subscription licensees would have sought out Adobe for. No one except aspiring professionals really needs the majority of Adobe projects to do competent looking amateur work anymore. Subscriptions from Adobe were meant to soften the initial sale, but A…

Maybe subscriptions will start going down, but Adobe's most recent quarterly earnings report [https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/investor-re...] says:

>Creative revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $1.23 billion, up from $942.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 and representing 30% year-over-year growth.

So not only are they still selling, but subscriptions increased 30% over the past year. Clearly it's working for them so much that they're finding success doing the same thing for the document cloud:

>Document Cloud revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $231.0 million, up from $195.9 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 as we continue to transition Document Cloud to a subscription-based model.

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