Why do businesses hector users with subscription requests when they already subscribe?
Case in point #1: I subscribe – as in pay money – to NPR+. Part of the pitch for NPR+ podcasts is that subscribers don’t have to listen to ads. Yet on both Planet Money and Short Wave podcasts this morning, they shoved sixty-second “thank you for subscribing” messages at me. Which is f***ing dumb, to say the least. Because now I’m ready to unsubscribe (and would if I didn’t have other reasons to support NPR). I mean, If I have to listen to (or skip over) a minute of messaging, I’d rather hear commercials, frankly. Maybe I’ll discover some useful service or product. Probably not, but I guarantee I find no use in being thanked repeatedly. No sane human needs that kind of constant sucking up.
Case in point #2: I have been a paid subscriber to The New York Times for many years. Yet I keep getting requests to subscribe, along with special introductory offers, in my inbox nearly every day. (Yes, the same inbox to which my subscription is tied.) This is not a hard problem, to compare two lists and remove from List A those items that are on List B. And half the time, when I click on a Times article from my daily feed, I get a request to subscribe at the bottom of the page… even though I couldn’t read the pay-walled article if I weren’t already subscribed.
And then there’s Amazon, which has its own special level of stupidity, as summed up in the cartoon below. (I’d love to offer attribution, but I can’t make out the name in dark type at the lower right.)
