Annual discounts

Posted Sep 25, 2002 18:28 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: A new era for LWN by ksmathers
Parent article: A new era for LWN

The lack of a one-year discount is an explicit decision: we kind of want to encourage the monthly subscriptions, even if they cost us a bit more. Should LWN eventually end up closing down, we don't want to let down a bunch of people who have paid for a long time and don't get the service they paid for. Monthly payments also smooth out the cash flow, and force us to live within our real means.

If things look solid in the future, we'll reconsider all this.

About polling readers: we do that at account creation time.

Annual discounts

Posted Sep 25, 2002 21:50 UTC (Wed) by ksmathers (guest, #2353) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I know that you won't be able to refund unused portions of subscriptions if you go bankrupt. Of course I haven't ever gotten a refund from any other news source, online or offline, that has gone belly up either, so I don't exactly expect it. What are you worried about, that I'll put a $40 lien on your house?

Normally magazines will attempt to sell their mailing lists to some competing organization when they die, often in exchange for some coverage of the existing subscriptions, but that always varies. Anyway, I still think you'd be doing both yourself and us a big favor by encouraging the yearly subscriptions.

Annual discounts

Posted Sep 26, 2002 13:28 UTC (Thu) by AAP (guest, #721) [Link]

I agree. I have too many monthly bills as it is. I'd rather pay for a whole year and not worry about annoying reminders for awhile.

Annual discounts

Posted Sep 26, 2002 1:29 UTC (Thu) by freelsjd (guest, #250) [Link]

Play to win! Don't play "not to lose"

Annual discounts

Posted Sep 28, 2002 4:18 UTC (Sat) by tuxave (guest, #4781) [Link]

You should really book subscription income as a liability and only move small portions to revenue as you fulfill each week of a subscriber's subscription. This provides you the benefit of only having money from the current week's payments as expendable as well as building up a cushion with steady predictable revenues for the future.