Tag Archives: products

Pay to use

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Is it just me or is everyone feeling the drain of subscription fees? My wife bought a scale that also gives biometrics. The app is free, but you get ‘so much more’ with the subscription. Looking into the cost of this, I see that it is $129.99 a year or 19.99 a month.

It seems every app wants you to subscribe, but the cost is excessive. I don’t mind paying $12 a year to remove the ads from an app I use regularly and enjoy, but I don’t need all the bells and whistles for $10 to $20 a month. And I don’t need the reminders of all those features I’m missing out on every few times that I open the app.

Going back to the scale, it’s designed to not just weigh you, but to give you other biometrics as well… it’s those other features that made my wife buy it, at a much higher price, rather than buying a regular scale. So, if I buy the product, why should I pay monthly to use it? And if those added features cost money to maintain, well then figure out a cost structure that isn’t so expensive.

Small yearly subscriptions make sense when you want to continuously add features and content, or provide upgrades and maintenance. But just how many $10-$20 a month subscriptions can we manage? And do we really need to pay our scale that much? If it was just the scale, I could imagine a scenario where I’d be invested enough in what it provides to pay this much, but when it’s every product and app that does this, it’s simply unsustainable.

We are the consumed, not not the customer

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There is so much BS on the internet these days. There are posts that either exaggerate or confabulate research data to sell ideas and products that don’t do anything they promise to do. I look up topics like reducing snoring or tinnitus and then for the next month I’m bombarded with ads for ‘cures’ of these annoyances. I’ll get detailed, directly-marketed-to-me advertisements including things like, “We are looking for males over the age of 55 in Coquitlam” to participate in a tinnitus study”.

I won’t just get pop up windows, and still ads, I’ll get videos embedded in my stream. I’ll get long format ads where it takes 5+ minutes to get to the point, because advertisers know that if they can keep people watching long enough they will feel invested in getting answers.

And here’s the thing, my ad algorithm will be completely different to yours. It’s targeted to our individual interests, our searches, our likes, shares, clicks, and even the things we say. We are not the customer we are consumed based on our interactions. We are data points that provide identifying features to be exploited. Targeted not for our benefit but to the benefit of companies that pay to learn that our data points are relevant to their products.

Click on an ad, even accidentally, and you can expect similar products to be fed to you many more times. Is this to serve you what you need or to serve advertisers what they need? The answer is clear. It’s not about us. We are data points consumed by an advertising machine. We are the target, the product, and not the actual consumer. On the internet of things, on social media platforms, we are just nodes of data sold to advertisers, we are products… And advertisers are the ultimate consumers of the data points (our data points) that they pay for.