Nearly a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24hrs
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
But, to nobody’s surprise, the MBAs don’t like options where the user doesn’t give away money by accident.
Auto renew is one of those things that should be illegal to default users into.
I wonder if there's a service that handles this kind of thing, it would be worth a subscription.
But guess what - it's in the interests of the business and the credit card company for me to keep paying
;-)
Thank you - that is actually a "solution" i will looking to it
"The service is prohibitively difficult to cancel" is a perfectly sensible justification for being unhappy with the service.
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 actual card number, but it's really more of centralizing the risk on Privacy's servers instead at 10 different vendors.
Is there an option to create virtual "credit" cards on Privacy? I only can make debit cards.
Easy to subscribe, hard to remove, and 0 costs to keep up accounts of people that don't use it, that sounds like a gym subscription to me.
- low-friction cancellation
- email users a few days before monthly renewals and twice before annual renewals
- ability to remove the payment method altogether
- don't require a credit card for a free trial
If cancellation takes effect immediately, the service should provide an immediate pro rata refund.
You get a new card and you have to make sure you migrate over all of your subscriptions and bill-pay to the new cc. Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.
That's why they do it I believe. But if they pair that up with subscription management it would be nice. Interestingly they do this exact thing with App Store subscriptions. You can cancel anytime it's done through Apple, and not the service/app you subscribed to.
This doesn't bother me as much as most of the other complaints here. How else can you keep someone from creating multiple accounts to get multiple free trials?
For non-sticky SaaS products, there may be a case for taking a credit card in order to prevent multiple free trials per credit card fingerprint, but there are alternatives, such as taking their phone number and sending a verification code. It's not foolproof, but it will stop the majority of free trial abuse.
A project management system is sticky, for example, because you can't easily take all your data out of it and put it into a different project management system that has different features.
A cold outreach SaaS isn't very sticky, because you can spam people for the trial period and then move on to the next cold outreach SaaS.
I activated the free trial for Apple Arcade because an ad for it was prominently shown in the settings app.
If you cancel the free trial, they immediately terminate the access. But worse: they did not send an email before charging the first non-free month. When I saw a €4.99 charge on my credit card, I canceled the trial (that I did not even use). I was disappointed about Apple using such dark patterns.
I've literally been warned not to sub to the New York Times by random people without prompting when the newspaper was mentioned in passing. Is that "growth hacking?" They've made having a subscription a life choice because cancellation is so painful, and they have so many predatory pricing dark patterns.
The subscription did give me full access to their articles. But it did nothing to eliminate the crap I really hate: interleaving of "sponsored content" with actual news, irrepressible autoplay videos, etc.
The unavoidable, usability-destroying advertising is why I cancelled almost immediately.
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 offerings to suite many needs. I wanted to use them for a specific project, but cancelling was so toxic (call to cancel, waste my time to cancel, argue to cancel, etc) that after cancelling once instead of re-subing next time like I had PLANNED I went to a competitor. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempt...
So they lost a customer for life. Verizon lost a customer for life. SiriusXM lost a customer for life. All because cancellation was a PITA. Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Why is business education so bad?
I feel like Costco, LEGO, or Ikea need to open a business school or something, just to teach a generation of people who want a business to survive a hundred years and go from one success to another. MBA education in the US feels like a "pump and dump" scheme right now.
Isn't that the stereotype? Join to juice some metric, jump ship while everything looks green, leave the mess to someone else
This all of course tends to be set up by fellow MBAs higher up the corporate food chain and since everyone keeps personally profiting no one sees any reason to stop, all the dead and destroyed companies were accidents, bad decisions, acts of god, etc… never due to systemic misunderstanding of business management principles… because that might actually be something the shareholders could sue over, and no one wants that, at a primal subconscious level it’s unthinkable.
Of course, this doesn’t exclusively apply to MBAs. I’ve seen plenty of consultants and developers do the same.
There is a cliff though where if you go over it you do alienate everyone and sentiment turns against the company and it'll fail. That isn't measurable though so nobody cares, and they'll just leave and land at a different company and try to juice it as well.
But overall with every business in the country doing this, it becomes pretty toxic. You're not actually producing things that people really want, you're producing things that maximally exploit consumers.
At some point, though, does the whole culture and economy fall over that cliff and you get systemic failure?
Adobe’s subscriptions are hell to cancel. It’s easier to cancel the credit card via the bank.
Btw, some time ago I was kinda shocked when Digital Ocean was able to charge an expired card of mine, multiple times.
The card had expired, and I had renewed it, but I didn’t have access to the DO account anymore, so I couldn’t update the card info. Somehow DO was still able to charge the expired card, and since I couldn’t access my account (and support wasn’t super helpful either), I had to contest the charge via the bank, about 5 times, until they finally cancelled the subscription and account.
The number of things I can do to modify my plans in-app - all except cancel - is not only striking, but clearly done maliciously. It’s a very deliberate decision that is easy to identify, there’s very little grey area.
Forcing people to call just to cancel is particularly evil.
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 badgering me by insisting that I review it. Every cancellation, I select "other" and tell them I don't do business with people that hold my subscription hostage until I answer questions.
Personally, I feel there is some fraud (or some other legal term here) going on when I press a "Cancel Subscription" button and it doesn't cancel. A regular confirmation box is fine and understandable, but they can't help but change the default colors and text on those, or word them oddly to make me want to back out. Bu "cancelling" followed up by mandatory questions/answers about why I'm quitting is forcing me to work for them building their data sets without compensation. Maybe I should send them a bill.
If so, why isn't this more prevalent?
I've often wondered about how to measure aversion instead of conversion.
> US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.
[1]: https://privacy.com
> This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel.
In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."
“It makes sense that sleepers churn: They aren’t getting much value from their subscription. Yet they don’t churn right away. In any given month, 90% of sleepers will simply continue to stay inactive. It’s only when they wake up again and come back that their cancellation rates soar, generally accounting for about 30% of active churn.
This makes re-engaging sleepers difficult. How do you bring them back into the fold and “wake them up” without prompting them to cancel?”
They are advising to trick users into continuing their subscription by not reminding them they are subscribed.
I am sure they are also against reminding folks when it is time to auto renew.
These are all tactics that hurt the overall subscription industry by making people not trust companies. The ethical thing to do is ensure each subscriber is subscribing by choice.
Tragedy of the commons.
See also: taxis. Uber succeeded in part because taxi cartels had become so incredibly unlikable.
What I haven't seen is an analysis of the effect on retention rate. That's going to play out over time. Some of the users who cancelled were going to anyway and some people you reactivated were saved. It would be very handy to have a formula of what values make sense to send out these campaigns so you can stomach the short term loss for the long term gain.
I hope those companies are not concerned if raising the dead causes cancellations.
The slack model that automatically charges you based on last months active users seems like the best way.
Basically, you pay a monthly/yearly fee and then all of the sudden you realize that are certain publications that are Exclusive for 'Gold' members or whatever! what a scam. They took a page from the SaaS business-space.
Assuming a higher subscription rate would be prohibitively expensive, then yes, I would prefer no option at all.
Personally I've enjoyed paying for individual movies on Amazon because the selection of free movies on Prime is underwhelming. (e.g. they have all the "C" sci-fi movies)
Cable has done the same thing for decades. Subscription includes a ton of free content, and you can pay more for PPV or on demand new releases.
They're handing out free subscriptions constantly to build the service, but the mixing of subscription content with pay content actively makes me use the trials less and makes me never want to pay for the service.
It's a different service, rentals, smashed into the service I pay for, prime "free" videos. That is what makes it frustrating. I do in fact sometimes end up renting those videos which is why they include them. But it's not a good customer experience by any means.
If there's an interesting story in, say, the Austin local newspaper and I live in Idaho or wherever I am not bothering to subscribe to Austin's local newspaper just to see if the rest of the article is actually interesting. And sure sometimes you get three articles or whatever but even then it's insanity to subscribe.
I only have an iPhone, and like to read news on my computer or tablet which doesn't run iOS. So that's a no-go for me :/
When your product is so worthless and uncompelling on nearly half customers don't use it and your business model relies on them forgetting they're paying for it, then your industry is DONE.
Mainstream/Legacy newstainment is absolute garbage. Not worth your time if it is free.
I think this is the model most commercial gyms operate on.
And when it stops working, if I notice, I can resubscribe. If I don’t notice - well then I didn’t need it anyway.
https://boingboing.net/2021/11/17/ftc-says-click-to-subscrib...
>Email newsletters, a welcome letter from the editor, a mobile app download, podcasts, subscription benefits reminders and/or a series of reminder emails over the first week and month have all proven successful with audiences.
Nope, nope, nope to all of that. Annoying me has the opposite effect to what the MBAs want.
As someone below notes: you can go to privacy.com and set up temp credit cards, with a limited $$$ amount. They can try to auto-renew all they want, but they'll just get declined.
Doesn't your credit report (unfairly) take a hit if you do that, the same way it (fairly) does if you don't pay your electric bill?
Of course, privacy.com will say Yes to any name & address you give with your credit card, so you don't have to use your real PII. Or your regular email. How would that show up on your credit report?
It's easy to imagine that everything you provide is checked, but it's not true. Just the credit card number, expiration date, and security code.
I refuse to subscribe to any service I can't unsubscribe from in a few clicks, regardless of the content.
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 robots. Have logic that knows how to navigate each company's phone system to reach an appropriate real person. And once they reach a live customer service rep, play the message, "Thank you for your business. We value you as a vendor, and will connect you with your customer as soon as possible! Your expected wait time is...", and have them wait while this middle-man service gets your attention.
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.
I'm curious if this has the potential to become an arms race similar to email spam generation / detection.
Although perhaps in the U.S., STIR/SHAKEN would mean more creativity is required.
a) Because the automated system will continue to call them until they connect a real person to the customer.
b) If the law is silent about which party can impose bureaucratic hassles on the other, then perhaps this system would satisfy some legal obligations.
I.e., if the law allows a business to argue, "The customer who wanted to cancel their subscription never stayed on the phone long enough tell that to our customer service rep!", then perhaps the law also allows a customer to argue, "I tried to cancel my subscription, but they kept hanging up on my voice menu system!"
Perhaps I misunderstand the law, but my (potential) pet peeve is that businesses get away with imposing time-consuming, costly friction on their customers in the form of paperwork, call-waiting time, etc. I think it would be just for customers to repay that in kind.
Links in German.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__312k.html
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/suche/faire-verbrauch...
https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/aktuelle-meldungen/vertra...
The experience of news subscriptions, and especially cancellations, is terrible.
Where are the pay as you go plans? I'll give your site $20, then you can debit my account some fee per article that I actually read. And no auto-renew.
My point really is that I'm willing to pay a reasonable price, but I'm not willing to sign up in perpetuity and I'm not willing to go through an onerous cancellation process. Treat me like a valued customer and let me buy the pieces I want. I don't really care to support parts of the paper/news I don't consume - which is what a subscription does.
I don’t want any of that crap. I just want the articles you used to produce in print, except now through my RSS feed. The energy you put into hiring podcast consultants or generating auto play video would be better spent on reportage.
It's one reason I hate substack.
It feels like microtransactions are the appropriate model to use here, but it will likely have negative incentives (e.g., prioritize clickbait even more.) The Apple News model is also fairly promising, but unclear if publications can support their businesses with it.
Worth every penny.
This mindset of "no, it is the people who are wrong" is completely backwards, and no amount of lecturing will make it true.
I don't think you're listening, because the point is that these people do read the news. That's what this report is about: they read the news, but they're not willing to pay for a recurring subscription. Lecturing one person (me) about the value of subscriptions is not going to change anything. I do pay for a few subscriptions. There's just far more that I can't read because it's just not worth the monthly cost. And that's the reality of the newspaper business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...
Specifically the "Cross ownership rules of 1975" were fantastic. The "Telecommunications Act 1996" started the downward trend.
My sense is newspapers have been totally lost in the internet era for some reason, and never figured out the basic "provide these services in this way and be nice to customers." I think these problems then trickled back to some extent with the paper versions too.
There's entire content categories (local event calendars for instance) that have essentially vanished locally in the way they used to be there.
I think it's possible to run a news organization well and my guess is there are some out there being run well but I don't think it's just your age.
The Wall Street Journal still publishes a PDF of the print version. If all papers did this, I'd have a lot less problem subscribing. Instead, they want you to use their app or log into the site.
In my case at least it would've been a payroll deduction so I'd never have to deal with cancelling. I'd just cancel the payroll deduction (as in it was a corporate rate).
A lot of people don't like Adobe having subscription services. I actually think subscriptions are a better fit for software. You never really "own" your software as much as you think you might. You've just created an incentive for the company to bump the major version and sell you an "upgrade" while abandoning your version. Adobe did this cameras they'd support with their RAW plugin. The RAW plugin just had completely nnnecessary minimum versions to force people to upgrade.
But Adobe's subscription model sucks. You have to purchase a year minimum. There are lots of dark patterns to auto-renew. Actually cancelling is difficult.
Compare this to Jetbrains (which I pay for). When you cancel you get to use any version you've paid for in perpetuity. They send you advance notice about renewals. I'm happy to pay it.
There are a number of news publications I'd like to support but I just don't want to deal with an opaque "introductory pricing" and having to call someone to cancel. I'm not supporting such practices with my money.
I realize some MBA somewhere has done the math on new subs lost vs continuing subs they'd lose but this is a classic example of short-term thinkin gyour way into extinction.
What I don't want is to overpay and/or take on a payment agreement (i.e., subscription) that's too easy to forget about, or too difficult to cancel (i.e., dark pattern).
not entirely their fault -- the entire electronic payments system has evolved to make non in person micropayments difficult
also possible pubs aren't confident enough in the value prop of individual articles to price them
I hate virtual economies + in-game currencies but for newspapers specifically, as an alternative to subscription-gating, it might be an improvement
anonymity is also a consideration; KYC fine, but the payment processor can know who I am without telling the content vendor
I bet many people do this, for any type of subscription.
I need something like Spotify for news sources. Ad-free access to any content. I’ll pay for that. But I’m not going to subscribe to each source individually.
Edit: I would want a way to avoid paying for clickbait that I accidentally click on. Maybe sources could be paid per active-viewing-minute and definitely not for clicks.
I don't know why someone hasn't done it yet but offer auto-renew on/off at the onset and when you log on the 1st time after expiry a popup with onceoff "top-up", with out any nagging emails or notifications along the way.
I find that high quality publications give quite an honest and objective view.
TY/BR
I did, have a look at the link to that submission...