A company's #1 job is, arguably, to stay in business. To that end, being able to accept payments is something each should always be making better, not preventing outright.
There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months.
How is that possible?
My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
The Guardian has it. But they are an exception.
On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment.
[1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.
That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...
As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?"
And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.