What I learned unsubscribing from 22 newspapers
lenfestinstitute.org
lenfestinstitute.org
When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.
If it's hard to unsubscribe - then their last memory is a bad one, and it's even harder to persuade that person to resubsubscribe again.
This is admitedly more applicable to industries with a lot of annual churn between suppliers - such as insurance, internet providers, power suppliers etc -- but it should be a rule of thumb for all companies.
Oh, you can just click a few "are you sure?" buttons, and that's it? All done online? Well, it isn't that much money every month, and I do read the NYT. If I can easily cancel, then...oh, what the heck, let's keep the subscription.
But I had to pick up a phone that day...
Don't underestimate how deeply, fundamentally, mind-bogglingly incompetent most decision-makers are at most companies. Not only do these people have no evidence to suggest it's more profitable (long-term, anyway), they literally do not care. The vast majority of decisions made at the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. today are driven by the Principal Agent Problem, made by people who will never be held account for any of their decisions, nor suffer any consequence for any downstream or long-term effects of anything they do. It's all just a game of who can suck the most blood out of the company short-term before finding another host. These virulent parasites will never give a shit about such mundane concepts as "supporting data".
That’s the best part, California’s prisons are over capacity so you’re likely just going to be given parole and community service! /s
I found the CA law and explained to them how what they were forcing me to do was illegal in the state of CA, started citing the law, and the NYT rep immediately tried to cut me off so it wouldn't be recorded, I assume.
If they've truly changed things, good for them.
They're never getting another cent from me.
I later learned that they have some special limited "pause subscription" mode that retains tokens, but I didn't see that when I was cancelling, and I shouldn't have to research different ways to cancel a subscription.
I pressed the Submit button but the next page fooled me so I thought I could close the browser tab.
I realized I was still charged a few days later, I went back to ensure I was cancelled where I realized I didn't complete the flow because you have to click "Continue cancellation" on the page that you land on despite thinking you’ve completed the process.
Nice lil F U on the way out.
I'm not sure this is as solved as you envision.
Starlink used to show me near chicago, but now is pretty consistently also dallas. T-mo is most likely to show me on the east coast.
I live in Central Louisiana.
I'm really surprised that so many companies don't understand this. It's just the old wisdom of "don't burn your bridges".
And, as suggested above, this has actually kept me from re-subscribing again later.
When I purchase a new subscription the first thing I do is cancel renewal so I can do it manually. When a site makes this easy I'm actually much more likely to end up re-subscribing and leaving it on automatic since I know I'll be able to have peace of mind and cancel any time.
When I want to subscribe to something on my iPad, I don’t think about it very long because I know it’s going to be easy to quit. It will sometimes cost more but I’ve been happy to pay it because that’s what easy quitting is worth to me.
My mom doesn't even know the word sideloading, but it doesn't mean she wouldn't benefit from being given actual ownership of her device.
I hate to turn my back on local news, but its owned by Gannett now who've ruined it, so I guess I'm ok with it failing. Sad though...
I was waiting for "so that's why we re-subscribe customers after a 6-month hiatus / every time we update our mail delivery service". At least that's what some companies have done to me...
I'd love SiriusXM at the promo rates they offer, or even at full price in a month where I know I'll be on the road for a while. I will never re-subscribe because they make cancelling so hostile.
T-Mobile, Google Fi, Ting, and (somewhat) Mint mobile all made it really easy to leave. I've been back to them a few times and I recommend them to others in my life. That $30 from Verizon cost them $100 per month in revenue for what likely would have been many, many years. It's just such a silly short-term approach IMHO.
How did you, exactly, learn this lession? Or you just personally hope that the world would work like this?
I will never resubscribe again because the cancellation process was so horrible.
Yet, anyone with basic reading comprehension can read this thread, and conclude these dark patterns are destroying the brand with existing customers.
And...those customers are not coming back. Ever.
Where is the A/B test for brand suicide ?
“We wanted to make sure that didn’t clog up the phone lines and create a poor experience for any subscriber calling for any reason,” Brown said in an email. “We then started making it available to more subscribers based on market research that we conducted that showed subscribers wanted this.”
~~~
Reads like: After I hired a market research firm to gather opinions from my brother, I decided to stop poking him with a stick.
Having said that I wonder if that example with the Boston Globe is sort of the old "Be Radiohead" example. In that situation Radiohead sold their album online for whatever you want to pay. It was touted as a good way to do business, because Radioheads sold a lot.
Later someone wrote satirical article telling other bands how they could do the same. Step 1 was "Be Radiohead".
In reality the reason for all the sales were ... they were Radiohead.
I wonder if the Boston Globe is at that scale where they can do that, while other places might not see any new subscribers.
I think that much of the importance of that step might have been lost in the satire.
The lesson is "create something that people truly want to pay for". If you manage to that goal, then cancellations should naturally decrease and/or sales should increase (depending on your revenue model).
Companies with an abusive cancellation policy are essentially saying that their product sucks and they need to try and hold customers hostage to maintain revenue. That is not long run sustainable.
No, that's not the entire lesson. If an unknown indie band had created an identical album, it would not have made anywhere near the same amount. If we're going to distill it down to "what people want to pay for," people usually want to pay for something they think other people like.
Yes, a small indie band would not have the same following as Radiohead at first. They need to build up a series of highly valued releases over time. Which is really all distilled into the "be Radiohead" line.
Or to make it less vague, your pricing and billing strategy may need to change over time. When/if you develop a history of delivering highly valued products and releases you will have the opportunity to explore alternate pricing models.
However, I still think you can distill much of this down to "create something that people really want". If you can do that the pricing part gets a lot easier.
It's a stepped thing.. you start at $30/month. Try to cancel and they offer you $20/month. Say you still want to cancel and they go through a series of discounts till it's < $5/month, maybe as low as $1/month.
When I went through this before online cancellation the process was so gross every new offer made me more determined to cancel even though the better offers were cheap enough to want to keep it. The whole process made me feel like I'd been ripped off.
Not really the same as Radiohead offering to let you name your price from the beginning.
Odds are anyone you unsubscribe from will spam you in a newsletter. Even if you opt out, you'll be re-added a year or 2 later. I've learned to use certain gmail for certain sites/services to prevent them spamming up my personal domain emails.
I really hope they make it 1 click to cancel as a law, I've had to call in my CC as stolen at least 2 or 3 times to end something or to prevent some trial period from charging me.
This also does a great job of catching data leaks or willful sale of client and customer data.
If necessary, blag it. Walmart? `wallace.martin@yourdomain.suffix`.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...
Works on outlook.com addresses too.
Unless you automatically file anything without +something as junk, of course.
With that said, it's a niche use anyway, stick to the catch-all on your own domain whenever possible, and for anything else, it's a fringe case anyway.
I have seen this happen with increasing frequency, but I am admittedly terminally online, and of all the sites I visit, it's probably 2 in 10 that don't allow me to use my own domain, but this is again completely anecdotal and based on the sites that I visit and I am not representative of the average user whatsoever.
"not having a gmail account" smacks of "lol you have compuserv? everyone else is on AOL!"
https://app.bchydro.com/BCHCustomerPortal/createProfile.html
>we can't accept generic addresses (e.g. sales@company.com). Please use an individual address (e.g. john@company.com)
Apparently hello@<firstname><lastname>.com isn't individual enough.
which i am now going to route to trashcan.
Your problem is with the hello@.
Do you have any specific examples if it has actually happened for a non-throw-away address? I'll make sure I don't waste time even trying to subscribe to their services!
Example: scorned employee or spouse, they redirect or copy email to x address, and they gain access to accounts via that.
"That could never happen."
It's happened plenty of times that it's a consideration for a lot of major institutions, and it's happened enough that the radio and bus stops in the UK have ads warning people of the signs of financial abuse.
That's without even getting into people not having automatic renewal set on their domain and losing the domain.
But I got this error when updating my residential account.
Since when did companies get to decide what is or isn't a valid email address?
I almost want to experience this, now, just so I can give them a hard time about it.
Are these companies really unaware that lots of individuals have their own domains for personal use?
I do understand where you're coming from though. I remember the days of setting up my first ever domain via post in the UK! I still have the letter lmao.
I don't follow. That reasoning would mean that if you use a gmail account, for instance, that isn't a "personal" email address either. It seems to me a personal email address is an email address you use for personal communications as opposed to business communications.
Where that address is hosted, or what domain its on, isn't relevant to the question.
Using different emails or addresses or different cards is not illegal
But the steps people take to get a discount... He could probably just straihgt ask for a discount and get it anyway without making a new registration.
Case in point. ChatGPT will not accept any masked email from fastmail.
I tried multiple traditional domains. No luck. The error was something to the effect "try later, too much traffic" something or other. (Hiding behind public perception, slick). This went on for days.
One day, after the 20th try...on the next second, I finally relented and used my google workplace email... (which ironically enough is not very liked , particularly by banks, since its not a traditional dot com domain). That worked immediately.
Less often than you’d think. Though I had one legal department write me, and a confused music label owner with a by-mail order process ;)
I really don't care about that. If anyone questions it I'm honest: “it lets me filter messages into folders/tags so I can prioritise easily, and it lets me easily block your company if it sends too much or sell my details on”. I once had someone (an in-physical-store “signup and we'll send you some vouchers” deal) refuse to accept such an address to which my response was “Fair enough, but if you won't take that I'm not signing up, you aren't getting other contact details out of me”. Other than that one example I've had no trouble in this regard, the only other significant reactions I've had being something along the lines of “I might have to start doing that”.
Never let commercial interests embarrass or guilt you into behaving in their favour!
I used a sub-domain for the catch all which has one or twice over the years caused an issue due to bad validation, not liking the extra “.” unless it is near the end like in .co.uk, at which point I step away because a company that can't deal with a perfectly valid email address domain part probably can't store anything securely!
> Most stuff that comes from email leaks gets caught but the spam filter already.
It isn't just leaks, it is when the company itself sends too much or gives your details to its parent/child/partner companies (most likely there was a non-optional, or at least default-on, checkbox that give them permission to do this). That sort of thing is less likely to be caught by general spam filters, though admittedly the volume or that is likely rather lower so the irritation likewise.
everyone is hip to the dot separation and + of google et al. it does nothing. good luck getting me to look at genewitch@mydomain emails, since i have used that exactly zero times.
That's not a problem. I look weird anyway.
I regretted using the main domain for that, as some junk mailers either cotton on to there being a catchall or just chance that many domains have many users with common names, so sometimes I would get several messages for andrew@domain.tld, brian@domain.tld, carl@domain.tld, etc.
These days I use STORENAME@sub.domain.tld which seems to attract a lot less junk, practically none, by the above manner. The catchall on the main domain was replaced by large forwarding list of the addresses I'd got legitimate emails from, with anything else now bouncing as usual.
> Retailers that don't honor the unsubscribe button
It also protects against when retailers are hacked and their mailing list taken, or them selling it on either as BAU or during the fire sale as they go out of business.
I read about that sometimes (or well, rather the less specific one where you’d get generally random spam to your domain), and in over 7 years of doing website@exmaple.org I never had this happen. I wonder what the difference between people like me, and people like you is?
On more recent decades I have seen bots even split by separator, e.g. if prefix.suffix@example.com is published online, they will try prefix@example.com and suffix@example.com.
That is likely someone trying to programmatically circumvent filtering based on catch-all-ish naming conventions, like gmail's support for usernamepart+anythingelse@gmail.com all going to usernamepart@gmail.com and similar facilities offered by other email services.
Sending to <something1>@dom.tld and <something2>@dom.tld as well as <something1><puntuation><something2>@dom.tld seems like a potentially useful heuristic. Though it may create excess false addresses, if spammers care about that sort of thing (that depends on whether the chance hit on real addresses is worth the need to transmit many more messages that will fail/bounce and maybe help train spam identification systems).
It may also depend upon what lists we've ended up on. If only a few junk senders are using the trick, the others deciding it isn't worth it without knowing there is a catch-all isn't worth it and deciding working out there is a catch-all with sufficiently few false positives is too much hassel, then it is quite possible it only happens to some of us.
It could also be that some people have done it to pad out email lists they sell, and so most of the others aren't really using the trick but just parroting the list they have bought. Again, this would explain the issue only being seen by some.
My domain is a .net that has been active for about 23 years at this point, so compared to newer domains its presence in spam mailing lists will have been subject to more fads in the junk industry over time.
My ISP is panix.com, which allows me an unlimited number of addresses like "STORENAME@myemail.users.panix.com". This is almost always accepted by websites, works just like the "+" version, and only once has anyone ever been surprised by it. ("Is this a joke???" "No, etc.")
Disclaimer: Just a happy customer.
Randomly give existing customers free periods or extend a subscription by a certain amount (week/month?), then notify them.
I'm sick/tired of cancelling something only to be told I can get a 'special discount' to stay or come back. It borders on insulting.
I've had multiple monthly services for years that never once extended or lowered my fee. That's fine, that's business. When I went to cancel some to switch (or just cancel), suddenly I can get an extra 50% off what I've been paying patiently for years? Just rubs me the wrong way. It's a game I don't really want to play.
Give me a good rate for the service. Surprise random 'gifts' of a free month of a service or whatnot now and then would be really nice. But it might remind me I'm paying for something I forgot about, and prompt a cancellation. I dunno.
Often when you see upped/higher data rates, it's "new customers only". This wasn't one of those cases.
Recently switched car insurance. I check every so often. Never bothered when the delta was $15/$20 over a 6 month period. Last week, there was a $200 delta, with better rate for lower deductibles. I bought new policy, went to cancel old one. Took 10 minutes of friendly text chat to keep saying "no, just cancel". At one point, the agent said "is there any possible thing I can do to keep you?". I said "no", then it went faster after that, but they'd tried "let me look for better rates" angle. WTF? You have some internal "better rates" that you don't give me up front? Makes me not want to go back in future.
They might have complicated contracts with re-sellers that prohibits them from advertising the cheaper rate. That's why you should always ask for a discount with every purchase.
I toyed a bit with this idea when I was working with subscriptions, but there are no systems that accommodate for this unless you make your own.
I wonder if as the subscription landscape gets more “toxic”, it’s a net negative for the whole industry. Even above-board offerings will get ignored by would-be customers that no longer trust.
In other words, they are clutter, or litter.
Eh, it's not so tough. I just don't subscribe. It's their loss more than mine.
And yes, unluckily those toxic 1/3 being hostile to subscribers hurt everyone else. : (
It includes comments from some of the newspapers about the thinking behind their cancellation processes and some considerations of the reasoning, which, regardless whether I agree, is enlightening.
As a side note, there’s hardly any outrage, which I find somehow refreshing reading an article on this or any other topic.
Perhaps because it wasn’t his money or time being taken by these websites. It was his employers.
Kinda makes me want to … subscribe to it…
Last year, I asked their support to unsubscribe me and rejected all the 50% discount offers. They said, 'sure, bro', and, needless to say, early this year I was hit by a (50% discounted) bill for a yearly subscription.
This sounds like roughly what I've been through with Comcast for the last decade, calling every year so they give a not-outrageous price. But quarterly calls does seem a bit more extreme!
I contacted support to check if this had changed and not only did they confirm that there is no way to cancel online, I was told that this is actually for my benefit! This was conveyed with a lot of corporate-speak trying rationalize the decision (or just confuse me).
An organization being greedy is one thing, but I really don't appreciate being gaslit about it. It's too bad because I like their work, but I won't support these kinds of business practices.
Recently canceled and (from transcript) it took 18+ minutes chatting with an online rep. They made sure I knew all the various benefits (newsletters, podcasts, etc), offered me multiple price discounts, and insisted that I try a slimmed down experience ("Espresso") for a month before truly canceling. I'll never consider re-subscribing.
I am also not desperated to create burner cards for paying for those.
I've had about 5 emails from Microsoft this week about my Xbox ultimate ending.
I NEVER subscribe to free trial offers simply because of the number of negative posts about how hard it is to cancel, and the pain involved.
It absolutely does hurt "good actors".
I used a burner for Financial Times and they were pretty clear that my subscription was active but pending payment. I still did not have access to the articles while in that status. They eventually cancel the subscription though. The reason I did not actually cancel was that the cancel page failed with an error.
I know this issue is not limited to the USA.
I would probably subscribe to the nytimes but I've been discouraged by the stories of how hard it is to cancel.
I canceled before they rolled out the online cancellation. I had subscribed early during the pandemic to try and have something high quality and local to follow. The online version of the paper is a lot worse than the old paper version was years ago when I got it. Lots of clickbait articles and articles intended to rile up online subscribers and drive engagement in the comments.
When I went to cancel the process was absolutely horrific. And it also revealed just how scammy the pricing is. The globe would be happy to let you have a subscription for $1 a month. But if you just go in and subscribe they will charge you 10x, 20x, or 30x that amount. You only get access to the cheaper prices once you tried to cancel and had to fight it out with the representatives on the phone. It sounds like the new online cancellation process is something everyone should do to lower their prices even if they don't intend to cancel. If you just sign up they might charge you $30/month, but as soon as you try to cancel they'll give you a way better deal.
If I sign up with 3 clicks, it should be (at most) the same to unsubscribe.
Unsubscribing (and cancelling any other recurrent payments) should be made from bank's website. It is noteworthy that banks allow companies to charge you but do not display list of subscriptions and do not allow to easily cancel them. There is no hope that banks will change, so I hope cryptocurrency wallets will fix this problem.
I believe this issue stems from the broader challenges that the print media industry faces, as they grapple with declining circulation and ad revenue. While it's understandable that newspapers would want to retain subscribers, making the cancellation process a nightmare only tarnishes their reputation and, in the long run, may result in even more subscribers seeking alternative sources of information.
A better approach would be for newspapers to invest in improving their digital offerings, making the subscription process more flexible, and providing subscribers with value-added services. This could include offering customized news feeds, interactive multimedia content, and easy access to archival materials. By focusing on the needs of subscribers and creating a seamless user experience, newspapers would be better positioned to maintain their relevance and grow their subscriber base.
It's high time that newspapers prioritize customer satisfaction and transparency. A frustrating cancellation process does nothing but alienate subscribers and contribute to the decline of the print media industry.
If the industry is in its death spiral, it makes sense to hold on to subscribers with reputation destroying practices for as long as possible.
These things are costs and antithetical to maximizing shareholder value (in the short term) and increasing executive bonuses.
I feel like it's a feature that could live at that level rather than deal with these patterns. Within the bank's app, a list of recurring payments or 'subscriptions' with a cancel button. Cancelling results in a failed payment authorization response to the merchant psp the next time they hit you for $, who can then treat it as a cancellation.
Or does it not exist because incentives.
One thing to remember though is that not paying is not the same as not owing. Most online services will do you the favor of cancelling if you don't pay, but there are definitely businesses that will keep your service going, and refer you to collections.
Everything else is too much to read.
>the length of the process is not intended to be deceptive, but instead meant to mimic the experience of contacting customer service.
So you are saying it is a pain in the ass to unsubscribe when you call?
>After contacting the AJC for comment, I learned that most people just turn off AutoPay
"i know we suck but we don't care enough to do anything about it."
What on earth? Why?
This is really what a lot of bad customer service issues boil down to, telecom is a classic example (I'm looking at you Comcast). There has been a lot of consolidation in American media in recent years and it doesn't really take a formal cartel, it just takes these guys at the executive layer looking at their competitor who is not much different, looking at their giant cash hoards, maybe buying each other a few nice dinners in New York City, and shrugging their shoulders as they light up another Cuban.
When it's having a populist moment the political class especially in the EU will take the issue du jour and talk about crafting a law to deal with it. But in a lot of cases we would be better off if they just enforced antitrust laws that are already on the books and got more zealous about that topic in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_F2dpj5Kas&t=42s
and if you have analog gauges too, there are no screens. (except the tiny one between the gauges which doesn't count imo)
They're also completely piano black free. Best car interior maybe ever. Thread here https://old.reddit.com/r/Audi/comments/w9dkcm/what_models_ha...
I live in the middle of nowhere (population around 200) and i can buy stamps with a 10 minute walk; envelopes, labels, boxes, etc as well. And if that post office is closed, there's another one 10 minutes up the road, and if that one is out, i can drive a triangle to get to another one in about 10 minutes.
Larger cities may require more time to get to a post office, but there's probably 5 places between you and the post office that also sell stamps and envelopes.
So I subscribe to the Washington post instead who do offer exactly that kind of subscription.
Obstacles while cancelling subscriptions are obvious. That's easy money. Probably, unless regulated, the issue will not be fixed, in general.
There is an obvious failure here, we shouldn't rely on companies to force other companies to undertake obviously good, pro-consumer behaviour.
I was surprised by only ⅓ making things difficult until the rest of the sentence…
> requiring fewer than five minutes to discontinue and presenting few, if any, obstacles
Considering you can sign-up in a minute (except typing in CC details if you aren't using a stored payment method stored in your browser or a service like PayPal) I would class anything close to five minutes rather excessive, and I'd be less forgiving of any obstacles (an “are you sure, we can offer you a discount” I might accept, but not multiple nags or properly dark patterns).
I'd like to see a breakdown where easy and moderately easy are split. I know five minutes is hardly excessive, but being able to sign-up a couple of times faster that cancel I find irritating.
> As a valued subscriber…
That annoys me, perhaps overly I must admit, as much as “we value your privacy” and “your exclusive code”. Attempting to butter me up with a lie just makes them look scammy IMO. I know I'm no more valued than someone who signed up yesterday and someone who subscribed a while before me is no more valued either, just like I know that while the code is indeed unique (as everyone got a different random one) the pretence that I'm somehow getting special treatment when in fact everyone has been sent a code, again, feels scammy.
> phone calls with customer service representatives
I had this one when unsubscribing from New Scientist, a publication that at the time I felt was more reputable than to be deliberately inconvenient (I say “at the time” as they are now owned by the same parent company as the Daily Mail so these days I'd expect bad behaviour!). Signed up with a simple web form years before, had to cancel on the phone. In fairness the call was fairly short, lacking in hard-sell (there was an offer of a few months discounted IIRC), and I wasn't on hold for too long, so it could have been much worse. One mild concern was that I didn't get any confirmation by email/other so if they somehow kept taking money I had no evidence that I'd cancelled – but I made sure to cancel payments from my side to stop that from happening.
If the cancellation process is a deep hole of dark patterns and anti consumerist behaviour then at least I can simply go and delete the token inside PayPals management portal.
Though due to this kind of annoying behaviour, I've become jaded and have given up on subscribing to news outlets all together.
But it's also true that the self-same ISP often has many discounts and offers available, and it turns out that they are there for the picking, if you only ask for them. So (before I got on a dirt-cheap paid-for ACP plan) the routine would be to call in, grope around for discounts or offers that could be applied, and then set a reminder for the expiration of that discount so that you could call back in and do the same dance with them.
With many products and services, it really is folly to pay full price. I don't know how many times I've regretted bypassing the little box that says "enter discount code here" because I didn't have one in hand. Often times, if you are shopping in a web store, they'll flash a banner with a code, and you want to write that code down because, chances are, they won't remind you when time comes to check out.
My card actually has a nice browser extension that automatically gets or generates a per-store card when I hit a payment form. Very convenient.
Are these really the two big reasons people cancel?
I cancel because the subscription is too expensive for what they offer, be it the quality slid or the content focus changed too much from the original. It is a cost to benefit analysis in my mind.
i got an $8 refund and a confirmation number, and that was it.
It doesn't make the article any less valid that most people wouldn't have that many subscriptions to care about.
> So, when I was asked earlier this year to unsubscribe The Lenfest Institute from 22 digital newspaper subscriptions left over from a past project, I was prepared to face confusing subscriber portals, unhelpful phone calls with customer service representatives, and worse.
Once you're in their system, it becomes near impossible to prevent them from bombarding you with solicitations to rejoin their service