Yes, that’s two to three clicks to cancellation, and a bright blue cancel button. Louis Dispatch had one of the most simple and straightforward cancellation processes. I’m not a UX designer, web developer, or digital subscription expert, but I did approach this work as an average consumer who has reasonable expectations for customer service and user experience.
This article includes some of my impressions and observations. “We then started making it available to more subscribers based on market research that we conducted that showed subscribers wanted this.”īased on my experience and from speaking with leaders at news organizations, it appears there has been improvement in recent years. “We wanted to make sure that didn’t clog up the phone lines and create a poor experience for any subscriber calling for any reason,” Brown said in an email. The Boston Globe, for example, first introduced online cancellation in fall of 2020 to a portion of its subscriber base after it received an influx of tens of thousands of new subscribers at the beginning of the pandemic, Tom Brown, Globe vice president of consumer revenue, said. Meanwhile, a 2019 study from the Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that the highest performing publishers are able to reduce their subscription churn by actually understanding why they cancel instead of just making it difficult for readers. news publishers “make it easy” for subscribers to cancel.
A 2021 American Press Institute study found that only 41% of U.S.
President Joe Biden even endorsed the FTC proposal on Twitter, saying, “It shouldn’t be harder to cancel a service than it was to subscribe for it.”Īside from the potential legal and regulatory issues, there’s a business imperative for publishers to not put up unnecessary barriers for readers. Last year, California also enacted new laws, that require stricter notification of auto subscription renewals in that state. In March, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a “click to cancel” rule that would make it as easy for consumers to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up. News organizations - and other online retailers - may soon have to change their practices. However, the remaining subscriptions on the list had unpleasant, frustrating cancellation processes due to the amount of time required to get to the cancellation page and the number and type of barriers to exit, such as poor site navigation, limited cancellation methods, or a deluge of renewal offers. I was pleasantly surprised to find that about two-thirds of the newspapers on my list were easy or moderately easy to cancel, requiring fewer than five minutes to discontinue and presenting few, if any, obstacles. As an organization, we reasoned we could divert the dollars we were spending monthly on these subscriptions to impactful Institute work, and I was excited to gain a consumer’s perspective on how newspapers approach subscriber retention as they face the pressures of a changing industry. So, when I was asked earlier this year to unsubscribe The Lenfest Institute from 22 digital newspaper subscriptions left over from a past project, I was prepared to face confusing subscriber portals, unhelpful phone calls with customer service representatives, and worse.
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