paidcontent reporting: he top priority for most magazine executives
today seems to be building iPad apps. Yet the user experience of a print
magazine is unmatchable: they’re cheap, never out of battery charge,
not a target for thieves and they have twice the screen space when
spread as an iPad screen. Magazines might have a place in our connected
future, but they risk losing a generation if they don’t modernize their
subscription systems instead of trying to compete with Angry Birds.
Consider my recent experience renewing my favorite magazine, The Week:
My subscription was given to me as a gift. After a couple weeks of not
receiving issues, I figured something was up. After looking into it, I
found my subscription had expired. I’d have known this from their
mailings, had I not gotten into the habit of throwing out all letters
from magazines due to their high rate of silly offers. I went to
TheWeek.com, clicked “Subscribe now”, which goes to a page that doesn’t
match their design hosted by palmcoastd.com that asks me to pay $49.50
for the next year. I checked “Check here if you want us to bill you
later” and they sent me an invoice, in the mail (you read that right, no
“e”). Who does that anymore? So I had to type the code from the mailed
invoice into a web form so I could pay by credit card.
In Japan you can buy a coke from a vending machine with your phone. The magazine industry’s still mailing invoices?
The Week isn’t unique in this regard. The vast majority of
magazine subscription systems are woefully out of date. I recently
bought a Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) for a year’s print and digital subscription to The Economist.
How long till I get the first issue? “Allow 5 weeks for delivery of 1st
issue,” according to their fine print. When I bought a Groupon to Dos
Toros I used it that very night for a delicious burrito. Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Prime will ship me a microwave in two days at no additional cost. Even the hottest new Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) products get only backed logged for a week or two. Why do those otherwise clever Brits at The Economist take 5 week to fill a new order for a product they’ve been making for over 150 years?
It’s time for the magazine industry to take a page from companies like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Spotify: charge by the month, require a credit card, auto-renew payments and let people cancel anytime.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-how-the-magazine-industry-can-save-itself-hint-not-ipad-apps
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