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Broken: Magazine subscription cards
Dec 1, 2007
I've never liked "blow-in inserts," the little subscription cards in every magazine that fall out when you open it. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, gives his perspective:
Take those "blow-in" subscription cards that we put in our magazines. Our circulation department wants to put in as many as possible, because five cards have a slightly higher chance of one being sent back than four, and six is slightly higher yet. As long as those cards earn more in subscriptions than the cost of paper and print, they're consider a good thing from the circulation department perspective.
Yet as we editors who talk to readers and get their email know, people HATE those cards. They fall out of magazines when you pick them up, forcing you to bend over to retrieve them and find a trash can in which to throw them away. This is a real negative cost that hurts our relationship with our readers, but because we can't measure it directly, it's an externality and thus mispriced at zero in the economics of the magazine industry.
Nicely put... they may be supremely annoying, but they work. Much like spam e-mail, it's hard to see how to fix it, when just one knucklehead respondent per million people is enough to support the practice.
Also see Chris's review of a typical card, which he says is full of lies. He even gives an example:
(thanks, bb)
I like to stuff these cards, blank, in the mail. I figure it subsidizes the Post Office a bit and incurs a cost on the perpetrators of the social nuisance.
-danny
The blow-in cards are bad enough, but the cards that are stapled into the magazine are worse, since I harvest all the cards from my magazines before I read them. Kudos to Readers Digest for perforating those cards so they're easier to remove.
I always carefully take out the cards and then put them in the mail - blank. They have to pay the postage. It's my little personal form of protest, and I feel good dumping a stack of 30 blank cards in the mail.
Alice
Great to know that I am not alone in my loathing of the blow-ins! Does anyone know if the post-office actually processes them if they're blank?
And as one commenter at "The Long Tail" blog pointed out, why are those blasted little cards included in the magazines for current subscribers?! Do they "work" in that case? I know personally, I generally don't resubscribe until my term is up and would never use a blow-in card to do it. The magazine will send me something in the mail (in fact many somethings) about 6 months before the sub is up, which I'll send in.
Also, its so annoying when those blow-ins drop out, that the last thing I'm thinking of is to give it to someone else.
Finally the lame explanation that keeps being offered is that they "work", which is to say they work *enough* (which is to say they may even be quite luctrative) to justify continuing the annoying practice. But would something else "work" phenomenally better if it wasn't so annoying? Annother commentor at Long Tail suggested that the cards could have some ancilliary value so they weren't just annoying pieces of paper falling out of the magazine when you read it.
Ah well...one can hope.
I don't mind those cards. They are handy as bookmarks.