I subscribe to about six different magazines. Newsweek, PC World, Consumer Reports, Better Homes and Gardens and a couple of others. I am good about reading them. It is rare that I don’t spend some quiet time flipping through and not unusual for me to read them from cover to cover.
Frankly I spend too much time here at the PC so it gives me another excuse to get away and disconnect from the net. There is something quite nice about sitting in an overstuffed chair to do nothing but read.
There are a couple of problems with that. The first is trying to find the quiet moments in which do said reading. The second is that every time I open a magazine I spend the next ten minutes cleaning up the 27 subscription cards that pop out. That leads me to my next comment.
Is it just me or does every magazine begin soliciting a renewal from you two weeks after your subscription begins. Newsweek does this all the time. I sign up for a year and then three weeks into the new year they begin bombarding me with special offers for renewing my subscription.
It makes me wonder how much money they spend on filling the magazine with content I want to read versus how much they spend to try and grab more eyeballs. There is something not quite right with this formula.
Wait…did I just read that you subscribe to “Better Homes and Gardens”?
I say drop all the cards in the mail and then they pay the postage – they’ll learn to stop putting so many of them in the magazines. (Someone told me to do this with all the credit card offers I get.)
Amishav,
Misleading and dishonest is a good description.
Babka,
In a different life I sold ad space for various home products. The spots were on 4×6 cards. Our sponsors said that they received a very nice ROI from that.
Misanthrope,
I used to subscribe to more but I reached a point where I just couldn’t get to them all. The current level is about right.
Chana,
Inquiring minds want to know.
I want to know what those “couple of others” subscriptions are!
Andy Rooney did something on those cards a while back, I think all subscribers find those things annoying. I am jealous you make time for reading them all, they just keep piling up here.
They also get an obscenely high subscription rate from those annoying cards. I don’t remember the number now, but I remember being shocked when told about it. Like you, I pull all of them out before I read.
I think they do that to get people to renew their subscriptions even when the have them- if you sign up again, you just the time added on to the subscription you already have, but it is misleading and dishonest. IMHO