Archive for the tech Category
Here’s a strange one: buying magazine subscriptions on eBay is surprisingly inexpensive, and it seems to really work. New subs or renewals, there’s a lot of money to be saved.
I had always used sites like magazines.com for my subscriptions; they’re generally much cheaper than going directly through the magazine’s renewal service, and generally easier too, since you can go online, do four different renewals in one transaction, pay by credit card, and be totally done.
But my cousin heard about a better way: eBay.
We’ve been speculating as to why this occurs, but like many oddities on eBay, we couldn’t really explain it. His theory is that since magazines basically don’t make their money on subscriptions but on ads, they want to raise their paid subscriber counts, thus getting more in ad revenue. So this is another way to get new subscribers (that’s the older term for “eyeballs” apparently).
Here’s an example: at magazines.com, The New Yorker is $47/year. On eBay, I can find that for about $24 (here’s a link, but it’s a live search, so you may find different prices when you try it). And here’s the worst par: on newyorker.com, the one year costs $39.95, which makes me feel like a real dolt for ever using magazines.com.
I took the plunge and set up a renewal. The company I selected had tens of thousands of good feedback - all from mag subscriptions, at least as far as I could tell. Saved some money . . .
When I first saw one of these in the forums I administer, I thought, “Cool. Someone’s really taking the time to put up a nice post!” But I soon realized that this was just another Google link game. They put up a nice post in your forums, with links and keywords to suit their needs.
They’re generally along the lines of “Convert YouTube Video to work on your iPhone” or something similar, and the text is littered with links to revenue-producing sites (sorry my screenshot isn’t the greatest).
Anyway, if you administer forums, and you see posts like this, DELETE THEM! I get about one a week, and I use Captcha and everything for registration. These guys are working hard, so it must be paying off for them. Stop the nonsense!
I just got an email telling me, among other things, that:
“Making a refund?
Refunds are quick and easy. Learn more”
On the “learn more” page, you get this info:
Hmm . . . seems like an awful lot of steps to me. This is one area where PayPal falls really short. Especially in comparison to a true merchant account or Google Checkout, they make refunds really time consuming. Far, far, from easy.
Saul Hansell has an article in the New York Times blog about Google driving away Postini resellers. Fair point - offer a service to the end-user cheaper than through a middleman, and you get rid of the middleman. It’s the old ‘disintermediation’ that the internet has been know for since the beginning.
I wrote about my switch to Postini earlier. I wouldn’t have done it if Google hadn’t started offering the service directly - partly for cost reasons, and partly because I didn’t need anyone in the middle of my relationship with Google.