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Comment by sagebird | Hacker News Reader

The Boston Globe, for example, first introduced online cancellation in fall of 2020 to a portion of its subscriber base after it received an influx of tens of thousands of new subscribers at the beginning of the pandemic, Tom Brown, Globe vice president of consumer revenue, said.

“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.”

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Reads like: After I hired a market research firm to gather opinions from my brother, I decided to stop poking him with a stick.

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“We hired a market research firm to tell us that people like sunlight. So we started building homes with windows. It was win-win all around.”

I'd certainly like everything to be easily canceled online.

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.

The Boston Globe was notorious for years as the primary offender in the "impossible to cancel" list. Offering them as a positive example for ease of cancellation past, present or future eliminates all credibility. It's like offering ... Joseph Stalin for a humanitarian prize.

A more apt comparison : offering Barack Obama the Nobel peace prize!

Two words for you: predator drones

Step 1 was "Be Radiohead"

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.

> The lesson is "create something that people truly want to pay for".

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.

We are saying the same thing from two different perspectives.

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.

Well, ok, but if your definition of "create something that people really want" is "build up a series of highly valued releases over time [until you are as popular as Radiohead]", then it seems like you're just saying "be Radiohead" in a more confusing way. So I'm not really sure what the point is. Step 1 is still "be Radiohead" because smaller bands can't do the same thing without first following many other difficult steps.

But then that pricing model applies to, what, like 20 bands? Okay, so those 20 bands should do that and every other band should do what Radiohead did until they sell 30 million albums worldwide.

The globe defaults to everyone gets a really high price, then if you try to cancel they immediately start offering you better deals until you agree to not cancel.

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.

How long do these prices last? Seems like the super-high price would reduce their top of funnel, since people like me (who end up on the site infrequently) would never consider it at the listed price.

Usually if you somehow end up in this kind of sales funnel, you get offered a ridiculously cheap first year subscription. Say $20 for first year, but then it's $12 a month after that. You call to cancel, and they'll keep dropping the price until it's back to that $2 or $3 a month.

You're right — they also have low-price options at the beginning. I just tried loading an article and, what do you know, I was "selected" to be able to subscribe for just 99¢!

They may have considered difficulty cancelling as a feature. It would probably look good in the retention metrics. Companies often hire consultants to tell them things that they already know but don't like to admit to themselves.

I think a more charitable read is “we ask our subscribers what 10 things really annoy them; this was one of them we could afford to fix so we did. ”

Man, the Boston Globe is way too expensive, but I'm still subscribed. After the marathon bombing, it hit me how crucial it is to have local reporters who aren't just on TV. Even though they get on my nerves sometimes, I keep shelling out the cash. I've lived in places where the last real paper shut down, and it's a massive loss that never gets replaced.

Definitely pretend you want to cancel and you'll get a reduced price.

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