The UX of Paid Journalism | Hacker News Reader

The UX of Paid Journalism

builtformars.com

58 pointsnnx25 comments

In June California will enact Assembly Bill 390 which requires subscription services to offer a means of unsubscribing online.

I'm curious to see if WSJ adds an online unsubscribe option, and what impact it has on their subscriber count.

(I'm not from US, so unclear on the full details)

I've seen sites who enable this only if you've given them a California address.

This is why in the Netherlands we have a law that says you must be able to cancel in the same way you entered into the subscription. Did you take out the subscription online? Then you must also be able to cancel it online.

This! 100%

If you can sell me a legal subscription at my doorstep, I can go to any of your companies offices and cancel it by talking to the doormen.

> Before you pay, the WSJ promise you that cancelling is easy.

The screenshot doesn't say that. It says you can cancel at any time and doesn't specify what the method of cancellation is. If you have been alive on earth long enough to have obtained a paid newspaper subscription, you know how this works.

This is an industry standard and it won't change because there isn't a better substitute that offers instant online cancellation.

Paypal is amazing for this. I jump between trials for news outlets and I can just sign up for the trial, immediately cancel my billing agreement through Paypal's interface and when the service tries to renew they'll simply be denied. I'm not sure if even possible for them to check, but services only seem to notice when they try to charge me again.

Once pitfall is you should never attach a credit card to a service you do this with. Back when I was a student and I re-instated my Chegg subscription with a credit card to study for finals and they immediately back-charged me for the time in between. This was despite being pretty certain I also cancelled from their website, and 100% certain that they had cut off my service for that time period, otherwise I wouldn't have been prompted to renew my subscription.

After a long phone conversation I learned companies don't care about well-reasoned arguments, but they'll flinch at the first mention of a charge back.

When you enter into an agreement for services, it’s usually not sufficient to just stop paying. You may still be liable for the charges if you haven’t gone through the cancellation process you agreed to.

As a consumer it's not obvious to me I'm still liable for services after those services have been cut off, which is pretty much always what happens when the renewal fails. I'd imagine services like privacy.com and virtual credit cards wouldn't exist if companies were going after people like me.

Just because it's not obvious to you, doesn't mean that the invoices will stop, or that your credit rating will be unaffected.

NYT specifically force posts if you try to stop paying without canceling. https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...

For others who haven't looked into the article: Cancelling is not the main point of that article. The point is that it's hard to subscribe.

I have an NYT subscription and I have done multiple sub-unsub cycles before so I'm so accustomed to go through this kind of BS, but yeah they can be better.

The FTC says otherwise in a release from 2021 -- https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/...

-- Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place. --

Perhaps that's why the WSJ signup process is so complex? /s

I don't know if it was done on purpose but I actually started laughing when I realized how annoying it is to just click slides that don't get to the main point.

But, overall, it's quite well done with some good tips and witty jokes.

I view it as intentional, it drives the point home by showing how many steps you'd have to deal with if you went through the process.

I was not able to click "next slide" at all, as it made the whole slides smaller. Literally the slide area becomes 2x smaller or larger, when you scroll the page on my Firefox. And if you scroll to make it large enough you can't see the button. It will show up when slides are to small to read...

But the content is solid. I remember thinking of subscribing some real newspaper from abroad to have a broader view and considered WSJ. Resigned after figuring out that I will have to call them to cancel. That's a joke. It feels awkward for a foreigner and may even not be technically possible.

The scroll UX was terrible for the portion of the page with the slider powerpoint. Clicking or hitting left/right keys just made it smaller. Scroll up a bit and it goes back to full size. Click to navigate and then gets smaller again.

THe UX of that should be fixed before haranguing someone else's upsell implementations.

What's even worse — I subscribe to the Economist, WSJ and FT and they are by far the greatest white-collar spammers among all news outlets.

If it works, it's not bad UX it's dark UX. It would be great to ask WSJ if they considered A/B tests?

I think the point is it doesn't work. The author had the time, inclination, and technical ability to get through the bullshit and eventually cancel. A lot of people won't.

Which means it does work, as a malpattern. If your customers can't get through the bullshit to cancel that reduces churn.

(Though this ignores the consumer-side counter, which is sort of a malpattern but IMO justified when the company makes cancellation difficult, of just cancelling the credit card authorization. Code 41 chargebacks are a beautiful thing.)

WSJ basically invented the paywall in 2007 (back when other major newspaper websites were 100% free) so they've probably done a fair amount of usability and A/B tests.

Chances are that they're trying to optimize for things that are different from the things you or I wish they optimized for.

Counterpoint: quite possibly they look at their large number of subscribers and take that as all the evidence that they need that there is nothing wrong with their subscription process.

Their retention rate is pretty high because the competition can't really achieve the same depth of coverage. This would be a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation. Not everyone needs a WSJ subscription. Those that do either have a business plan or invest in a personal plan if they're say, MBA students. For most other people, WSJ is too stuffy and business-focused to be worth the cost.

There's a reason why WSJ is considered gold standard of financial/business papers, and upstarts like BusinessInsider and QZ fall far short and have to target a poorer niche of general-interest users.

> If it works, it's not bad UX it's dark UX

How are you measuring that it works? Are they getting better subscriber numbers with this UX than they would with a simpler one?

journalism is 3rd part of law which is free with any authorities.

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