I take the point about subscribers being hard to count to mean that even though most of the money comes from subscribers, each individual subscriber doesn't have much leverage or bandwidth to communicate their desires to NYT. On the flip side, each individual advertiser commands some sizeable chunk of NYT's revenue as leverage.
The NYTs is also known to hassle subscribers who want to unsubscribe. The only reason a company would do that is because they know some people will give up, effectively disenfranchising them.
Anecdotally, it took ten minutes to unsusbscribe this morning (going through an online chat service rather than calling them), which is much longer than it should take, but worth it. It may be worse now due to this incident.
I think it's beyond the pale that they require you to chat with a sales representative to cancel a subscription. To reiterate, the only reason a company would do this is because they know it will suppress the number of people successfully unsubscribing. The NYTs is using the same sort of strategy commercial gyms are infamous for, albeit in a less extreme form.
Contrast it with Netflix's model of unsubscription, which you can do at any time with a single click. They've even gone as far as automatically cancelling inactive accounts. Netflix is obviously a company with confidence in their own product, so they don't resort to any dark patterns in their unsubscription process like the NYTs does.
I’ve developed a habit of canceling things via email. It tends to get a fast response. Any run around is dealt with easily by keeping responses short. And if they charge my credit card again I’ve got a record of exactly when I contacted them so I can pretty easily issue a chargeback. It can also be helpful to make it clear that if they ever want my business in the future they ought to be showing me good service now by canceling without wasting my time.
Netflix is obsessed with data. Easy cancellation lets them define a much more accurate loss function for the AI they eventually want to run their whole business for them.
Strongly agree. My original plan on unsubscribing was to come back if they blinked on SlateStarCodex (everyone makes mistakes), but after being made to jump through these extra hoops, I'm through with this company.
I got through their virtual agent and reached a human agent who decided to transfer me once she got to know I'm asking for cancellation. I got this response "Please wait one moment while I transfer you to an account specialist." Now I'm just waiting after another automated response "Sorry our wait times are longer than expected. Thank you for your patience." This really sucks.
