Recurring revenue is the holy grail for businesses, not one-shot revenue.
Stock investors do not reward companies that eat their seed corn. They short those companies.
If you know which companies are sacrificing the long term, you'd be shorting their stock.
If we look at something like a Netflix sales pipeline we have:
Marketing that arranges interviews with stars of their new shows on new channels and on youtube and gives TikTokker preview screenings and merchandise and proposes pieces to the New Yorker and the NYTimes on how deep the script is etc..
Advertising makes sure that when you search "that new show staring XX from the NYTimes" they find the right thing
Sales takes the visitor to the website and tries to turn them into a customer.
It's the C-suite, mostly the CEO and maybe the CFO and the revenue team that decides "we will offer subscriptions".
So it's sales, not marketing the convinces people to part with their money, and it's the company management that decides on subscriptions.
(And I'd note that I prefer a subscription model for Netflix to one-off payments.)
> I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas.
Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?