Item — HN Reader

> if people wanted magazines on topics they care about ... they’d buy ’em.

I do wonder if this is entirely true. Some print magazines I would have liked to subscribe to made it unpalatable in one way or another (dubious cancellation mechanisms etc.)

I looked at subscribing to several magazines within the last few months. One had no explicit cancellation mechanism, one would have been delivered to a courier office several miles away and this one was no longer accepting subscriptions.

I'm sure it's hard to make this work - but perhaps there are self-inflicted speedbumps here as well?

4 comments

I think it's an issue of customer need. I need a car, I can't get to my job without one, and so I'm willing to pay a $250 non-refundable deposit before knowing my interest rate and wait two months for my model y to come in.

I don't need a magazine, the content is free on HN, so minor inconveniences will prevent me from subscribing. If customers really needed this magazine they wouldn't care about how hard it is to cancel, and the magazine would probably make it easy to cancel because they would have better revenue streams to chase.

Hmm, I don't entirely agree - I don't, after all, need my Disney+ subscription, or my Spotify subscription, or several patreon sponsorships.

I think those are comparable. The major intrinsic advantage they have is that they offer immediate gratification. The non-intrinsic advantage they have is that they're low commitment.

When you could pick up a relevant magazine in a shop that had both characteristics. Now it has neither and one of them's self-inflicted.

Assuming the advertising model still works, yes everything is "free".

For me it was the content to ad ratio. So many of these magazines are filled to the brim with ads, and have very little real content. Why would I spend money to look at a bunch of ads?

Before all the e-tailers existed one would often buy a computer magazine such as Computer Shopper for the ads and the articles were almost a nuisance. True enough now that the best deals are all online though.

I still have a box of them somewhere, I have one from early 90's that still has all the circles on vendor ads where I was doing price comparisons. Those were the days.

This, I got burned by Python Magazine, I tried to cancel before they Auto-prolongued my subscription and stopped publishing even the online only paper a month later. I never got my money back, now, my bar for spending money on magazine subscriptions is very high.

Absolutely this. I've tried in the past to unsubscribe from publications from both Future and Dennis and in both cases it was a tortuous exercise to actually get the subs cancelled.