Technology The end of “click to subscribe, call to cancel”? One of the news industry’s favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says

tom_mai78101

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Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from “an annoyance” and “ridiculous” to “shady” and “oppressive.”

Publishers tend to think of this as “retention.” A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe.

The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently made it clear that it sees the practice as 1) one of several “dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscriptions” and 2) straight-up illegal. The FTC vowed to ramp up enforcement on companies that fail to provide an “easy and simple” cancellation process, including an option that’s “at least as easy” as the one to subscribe.


 

The Helper

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Finally! There are still people that are signed up for AOL dial up that think they need to pay for their email address
or just do not know they are still paying monthly even up to the point of 29.99 a month in some cases though I am
sure those are few nowadays hopefully. The Click to Subscribe and Call to Cancel is cornerstone of Cable company marketing too
hopefully this new rule will apply to general offers and not just Internet.
 
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The Helper

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It is interesting how this thread has 755 views but only 1 reply while everything else in this forum has less than a hundred from the same time period. Something about this news post the search engines or bots like.
 
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