this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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That's one of the reasons companies love subscriptions. You'd think that people would cancel whenever they aren't using it, since it presumably is rather easy. But most are lazy or maybe have the irrational fear of missing out, even if they could easily resubscribe, should they ever need it.
Personally I wonder if one of the next steps of enshittification would be longer minimum subscriptions, but I guess with these kind of stats there isn't a need for it yet.
It's the Gym Membership profit model. At any given time, all gyms have far more subscribers than they have capacity to handle. But they know only a subset of subscribers will show up regularly, and many will never be there at all.
Fractional reserve fitness
Yes, although part of the gym membership profit model is what I alluded to in the second paragraph. Usually they make it quite difficult to cancel and have long minimum subscription durations (or charge you a multiple for month to month basis).
So I wonder if we will see that becoming the norm for streaming services as well at some point. At least the long durations. I guess they cant make it as difficult to cancel as gym memberships, since it's all online and automated.
Gyms have the advantage of ostensibly being beneficial for health, which I'm sure also prevents people from canceling. They feel like they really should be going, just aren't.
Except for January 2nd, then the gym is an absolute shit show
Sometimes it's not laziness. These companies will make it a game to cancel. Hiding the unsubscribe button or requiring you to call. I recently signed up for Amazon Prime mostly to get rid of the nag screen when I checked out. Finding the unsubscribe button took longer than it should have. Then it was three screens, with each one asking me if I'm sure or if I wanted to "pause".
Fucking dark patterns.
I think long minimum subscriptions would prevent more people from casually signing up. I'm guessing it's better to get more people in the door easily for the reasons you stated at the beginning. Or they would need really, really compelling content to force people to swallow it, but streaming services have proven it's not that easy to make content that good.
Yeah you are probably right. Squeezing the most profit out of your customers certainly isn't easy.
But I am sure they are constantly running the numbers in the background, just as they did with other changes such as the crackdown on password sharing or changes in subscription tiers.
I do think people will always want some form of entertainment. And with cable on the way out I'd imagine that as far as streaming services go Netflix is in a good position to be that default "minimum" so to speak.
Only question would be if free services such as YouTube could fill that entertainment void and make people not want at least one streaming service (I'd assume that once one of them does long subscriptions, everyone else would follow suit)