People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-sick-and-tired-of-all-their-subscriptions-cbee7e03

by malshe • 3 years ago

68 52 3 years ago

wsj.com

malshe4• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/UOrkU

FalconSensei3• 3 years ago

WSJ: People Are Sick and Tired of All Their Subscriptions

Also WSJ: Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

potemkinhr• 3 years ago

Yeah, the irony in that one is great

amelius• 3 years ago

On the contrary, I think it should be applauded that they publish stuff even if it goes against their own interest/image.

ksd482• 3 years ago

They should provide a one time purchase option of articles published by them for the day. Like newspapers. Of course, it should cost quite less. Pennies or a dollar or so.

Or, an option to purchase just the article itself for pennies.

Johnny555• 3 years ago

If there was a privacy preserving micropayment system that charged pennies for per news article across a wide variety of news sources, I'd sign up immediately. But what I don't want is a micropayment system that just turns into a big tracking system to track my reading habits across a wide variety of news sources.

standardUser• 3 years ago

I've been waiting for that kind of option for years. Decades even! But the reigning paradigm among all businesses these days seems to be subscription-based recurring revenue, so I'm not holding my breathe.

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

Here is the article: https://archive.is/UOrkU

And you can pay here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/archive.today

FalconSensei3• 3 years ago

that would actually make sense. Just be able to buy today's newspaper.

Same would be interesting for weekly magazines. Like... occasionally I'm interested in a magazine, but I just want like 1 edition because it has something that caught my attention

rufus_foreman• 3 years ago

A paper copy is $5 at the gas station or the grocery store. I buy one once in a while and would rather do that then pay $1 online and be tracked.

I certainly won't be signing up for a subscription that makes it harder to cancel than to sign up.

Also it's good to be reminded once in a while how badly being online has destroyed my ability to concentrate, which is what happens when I sit down to read an actual newspaper.

yashg• 3 years ago

There is a publication in India (The Ken) that allows you to buy a single article. But the cost of a single article is so high, it's not really worth it. It's 1/6th of the price of their annual subscription. The idea is to discourage single article buys and push a customer towards an annual subscription because it's a much better value. Classic pricing technique. Of course they are a business and they have to maximize the revenue.

If people could buy single articles for pennies, no-one would buy the expensive monthly/annual subscriptions except the diehard fans.

butterisgood• 3 years ago

I was just thinking this. "Sick of subscriptions? Subscribe here to read more!"

falcolas• 3 years ago

Much like games as a service, there’s finite time and money people can put into recurring payments.

And when one of those finite limits is hit, something will give. One service will be dropped for another.

xg153• 3 years ago

If nothing else changes, this will just mean increased competition between services to not become the one being cancelled, i.e. every service trying to make cancelling as unpleasant as possible.

beauHD• 3 years ago

How much do you need to commit to a subscription though?

If it's a few weeks just to watch Ozark, then fine. Just be careful to abandon your account and never renew if you wanna watch just one show.

I don't have insider data, but I guess many people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it. It's this psychological mechanism that has people watching just because they pay for a sub.

Once you research the best shows to watch, you can watch them all in succession, then destroy your account and carry on with other duties.

You have that choice.

ricardobeat3• 3 years ago

"Choice" is a very funny word to describe that. If you watch a new show every couple months, you'll have a string of subscriptions anyway, not to mention the massive PITA that managing this would be.

people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it

Pretty much like TV has always been. Wouldn't be much of an issue if they hadn't decided to become a producer and spawn the 10 different streaming services we have now.

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

define:choice

The act of choosing; selection.
The power, right, or liberty to choose; option.
An alternative.

There exist many alternatives to watching new TV shows. For example, books, work, exercise, cooking, staring at the wall, playing music, gardening, etc. Hell, one could even CHOOSE to spend 2 minutes and change their media subscription every month so that they are only paying for 1 every month.

justinlloyd• 3 years ago

That is an incredibly myopic viewpoint as subscriptions go much further than a few shows on Netflix or AppleTV.

I subscribe to Shapr3D, Fusion360, Jetbrains, Netflix, Adobe, 1Password, Dropbox, and a half-dozen necessary services. I'd much rather just pay for the software at that point in time and never upgrade. But rent seekers don't like that business model.

ff317• 3 years ago

I hear you, but: good software/services require continuous investment. It's kinda hard to set an up front one time price that covers that without it being ridiculously high. You're not buying one copy of a static piece of software: you're buying all the future bugfixes, security mitigations, server maintenance, future integration work (it has to work with the next upcoming version of your phone's OS, or the next version of your browser, etc), adhering to important future tech standards in the space. With a subscription model, those costs can be amortized over the lifetime that you're actually using the software/service, and can increase or decrease as necessary due to economic conditions as well.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

True, but the reason that I don't do that (instead, I just don't do subscriptions at all) is that is a lot of recordkeeping and attention capacity to spend. Much more than I'm going to do (whether I intend to or not).

I'm guessing that a substantial number of people keep subscriptions they don't really use because of the same effect -- they aren't putting in the work to actually track them, so they get forgotten about.

conductr• 3 years ago

I watch Netflix because it allowed me to cancel my cable subscription. But now I also have disney, hbo, and a few others. In the end, unbundling allowed for better but more expensive content. It's primarily come from my movie theater budget since there's only 1-2 a year I can be bothered to care about for the last several years.

pastullo2• 3 years ago

I'm toggling between Disney, Apple TV, HBO. This also allows me to build up a backlog of a handful of high-quality shows on each platform while paying only for one per month. The one i cannot cancel however is Netflix since multiple households now depends on my monthly payment.

ricardobeat3• 3 years ago

Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

zwieback• 3 years ago

For me it's a mixed bag. On the plus side streaming services that I can pause/unpause at will. On the negative side is the fragmentation of quality media where the subscription is just high enough to scare me off. NYT, WSJ, Economist...

pastullo2• 3 years ago

Agree, however i feel that NYT plays it smart. I currently pay only 4$/month which is negligible enough for me to keep it on.

Since i'm a happy subscriber of Bloomberg, i am really not keen to pay another 30$+/month for WSJ but i find myself trying to read some of their articles. Would love to find a cheap solution that gives me limited access (max 10/20 articles/month)

sys_64738• 3 years ago

These stories where folk say they spent $5k on subs over four years without realizing it. Are these folk real? Why do you not know where your money is going?

bick_nyers3• 3 years ago

That's about $100 a month, not too farfetched.

rnd0• 3 years ago

or about 10 $9.99 subscriptions, less if some of them are $15.99 ones.

Animats• 3 years ago

I have very few subscriptions. Internet, backup, some web hosting. A gym that's within walking distance. That's it. Everything else is pay-as-you-go.

I had a paid LinkedIn account for a while, but that generated spam, so I cancelled.

xg153• 3 years ago

I find it sort of funny that a lot of tech journalism still follows the assumption that consumers somehow want subscriptions - or at least wanted them at some point in the past, even if they grow weary of them now.

If that had ever been the case, companies wouldn't have had to use every carrot and stick at their disposal, from promotions to dark patterns to paywalls to eventually just discontinuing onetime purchases completely - just to drag users into subscriptions.

I'm pretty sure subscriptions have always been a trend that was driven exclusively from the business side - so I don't think consumers signalling "exhaustion" here is any significant development. They didn't have a lot of say in the matter in the past and they don't have a lot of say in the current time either.

happynacho• 3 years ago

This is exactly why I continue to torrent stuff

malshe4• 3 years ago

Because of all the subscriptions, I used to have a difficult time tracking them. A couple of times I had subscribed to services only for short term but then forgot to cancel them in time and they kept running for a few months. I think one was Amazon kids related digital product. Once I realized that I can’t trust myself to cancel the subscriptions on time, I started using Privacy.com cards. It allows you to limit the total spending limit on the cards. This has helped me a lot.

I also use them for free trials which require a credit card and then automatically convert into subscriptions after the trial ends. I create a one time card with $1 spending limit. Then when the trial ends and the vendor attempts to charge my card, it gets declined. So far this has worked beautifully.

bick_nyers3• 3 years ago

I've been thinking about doing this more and more. How easily can you "reclaim" your money though? If you have 10 cards with $1 limits on them, how do you get that $10 back? To me it sounds like just another thing to track

malshe4• 3 years ago

I am not sure I understand your question. I am not actually spending any money here. I am just creating a one-time use debit card that has a spending limit of $1. Once I provide the card number to a vendor for a free trial, that card is now locked in for that vendor alone. It can't be used with any other vendor. When the trial ends, the vendor will charge my card for an amount equivalent to their subscription, which is usually way higher than $1. The card will decline this transaction. The $1 limit was never used so you don't spend any money. Delete the card whenever you want. I usually delete one-time use cards once every few months.

Edit: It's more like a debit card than a credit card.

badboychronic• 3 years ago

I hated cable paying so much and using so little, PlayOn.com helped a lot with subscription.100 percent legal using the old dvd laws Just record on phone or computer and have the shows forever. I have to admit HBO and Disney having movies same time as theater release makes it hard to cancel those channels but I still record if money becomes a issue.

bluenomatterwho• 3 years ago

Lately, in light of things like Substack, I'm really wondering why we don't see more micropayments. Sure, it make more sense to pay $5/month if I'm going to read everything from that author, but (at least sometimes) I would pay $1 for one article. As for services, there are a few core reasonable things to pay for: cloud storage, hosting, maybe Github copilot or Adobe. What is certain is that no one wants to pay for 500 Twitch Streamers, every author of every Substack, youTube AND Hulu etc etc.

People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions

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