I was a subscriber to NYT until I wanted to cancel and there was no option to do that, you had to call some number in the US and explain yourself to some guy about why you want to cancel your subscription. Learned my lesson there, never again.
Whenever they have an online help chat with a human and they tell me to call, I tell them I deaf. It's not true but they have always just done the cancellation for me. YMMV
Same. Left a really bad impression. Their shitty pricing model too, charging people $100s/year until they try to cancel then reducing it down to like $30/year.
Me too. This is why I just subscribe to Substack now. Yes they try to subtly pressure you in ux to “just pause”, but that’s nothing compared to NYT “please call this US line”.
Agreed. Same goes for online streaming content. I'll pay up to $50/mo in total for media subscriptions (eg: Netflix). I won't pay $19.99 for 8 individual services that each have 1 or 2 things worth watching and then a bunch of filler (Netflix is continually heading this direction, IMO).
I have no issues at all paying for content, but I really only want to pay for the things that interest me directly, not a bundle of shows that have no personal appeal. And there is a disincentive to have too many services in general.
It's not really their choice. Most of the content owners have their own competing service now, so Netflix need content. Small amounts of good quality content won't keep people subscribed for long, so they need quantity and quality.
For me, the internet works like this: you find a link on social media. A cookie banner or paywall prevents me from reading the article. So I read the comments section. Nice shooting yourself in the foot, original content creator.
