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Tistronyesterday at 6:29 PM2 repliesview on HN

I've been close to subscribing to The Economist a couple of times, but when I do a web search I find a lot of people complaining about their similar practice of making it difficult to unsubscribe, so I've refrained.

I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?


Replies

jbonatakisyesterday at 6:51 PM

Unsubscribing from The Economist was one of the most frustrating corporate interactions I've ever had.

Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.

garethspriceyesterday at 6:54 PM

It's hard to calculate the number of people who don't subscribe at all, but you can calculate the number of recovered subscriptions from a retention process.

FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.