Magazine Renewals

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.