dekedangle_rpfanon | #29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

This is the twenty-ninth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Any plans I had ever to subscribe are over now.

https://twitter.com/daninpittsburgh/status/876750736071282689

(For those who don't want to click. Apparently to get access to the super special Stanley cup content that was released today you *must* be a 3 year or lifetime subscribe. They've basically created a paywall within the paywall #paywallception)

Wow, that's next level dickery.

I don't love paywalls in general, but site upkeep/hopefully paying contributors something/etc. makes them a quasi-reasonable business model that's not that different imo than paying for an old-school newspaper subscription.

I totally agree that this is next level dickery, though. Especially since it sounds like this was JUST announced as opposed to informing new subscribers that hey, if you pay for a long-term or lifetime contract you'll get bonus content up front or even giving them an option to pay for the extra coverage NOW as a one-time thing if they don't qualify .

NA This to me is kind of like the difference between buying a pro/paid version of an app, which I'm okay with compared to the freemiun pay to win games where they keep trying to gouge every little thing they can out of their customers.

Even if announced ahead of time, I can't day I'd be interested in a site whose coverage is tier based.

I'm pretty okay with paywalls as a concept, even as I resent them personally when something I want to read is behind them. But I like to be able to support quality content.

However, this is a whole other thing. Why would you rile up your PAYING CUSTOMERS by a) not making this clear to them in advance and b) not giving them the option to buy now, as you suggest? Like, at this point the site is actively turning away money that people might otherwise be inclined to give them for this one-time package.

A one time payment isn't a sustainable increase in revenue, though. Either way it's really shitty to spring it on people suddenly and those optics don't help their case.

Just to get the facts straight: Basically they just announced that only lifetime and three year plan subscribers will get exclusive new content? And they are giving current shorter plan subscribers a chance to migrate to longer plans?

Imo they really should offer discounts on the long-term plans for current subscribers if that's what they're doing.

Why though? Content costs money. Adblockers and illegal streams and paid content that's posted without authorization is why online publications are struggling. The layoffs and force reduction that's been happening at Yahoo and ESPN and others doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are obviously a lot of other, arguably larger, forces at play, but this is definitely part of it.

The three years and lifetime (what does that even mean? it does sound ominous ngl) subscription restriction is pretty extreme, but if that's what's needed for their business model to stay afloat so they can keep producing more content and hiring and paying good writers (which is a big if, and I don't know if true at all) than I'd support it.

I think the issue here is not that they have graduated subscription levels, but that they apparently didn't inform one-year or monthly subscribers beforehand that they might miss out on content. Looking at the website, they're offering an "upgrade" to the 3-year level to people who already subscribe, but I can't tell whether you get a discount for the the 3-year level if you've already paid for a 1-year subscription (which you should!).

Also, it's not like they charge you for the subscription on a monthly basis; if you want the 3-year subscription, you have to pay the entire $66 up front, putting it out of reach for some people who might otherwise be willing to pay what amounts to $1.83 a month.

sa to add that obviously it's fine to charge for the entire amount up front, and people can decide whether they can or are willing to afford that, but it's shitty to spring it on people without any prior warning, giving them no chance to budget for it.

Absolutely no one is failing to understand that fact that content costs money, or mad about that. The people who are affected by this and angry about it have already agreed that they want to pay money for that content. What's unfair and shady here is that in changing things up by suddenly adding an exceptional paywall behind a paywall, DK is not only requiring that month-to-month or 1-year subscribers take a loss compared to longer term subscribers in order to see that content (unless he will retroactively credit what they've already paid towards the longer sub, since paying month-to-month and then changing to lifetime is less economical than having just paid for lifetime in the first place), it's also asking for a large outlay of money for an inherently risky/unstable return, JUST for the sake of a one-off collection of material that may be redundant (what is in it that DK hasn't already covered? or any of the numerous other media that covered the event?). If I've already been paying every month to see your content, I'm not going to be happy if you suddenly tell me I need to fork over an additional 300 dollars or whatever for something I was already expecting as part of my month-to-month.

He would have been better off doing what I saw someone else suggest, which is offer their playoff content as a package to the general public as a one-time purchase. A lot of fans would probably go for that after the high of a Cup-win, and he might have ended up keeping some of them as subscribers. This way, he's just pissing off people who have already been paying him.

AYRT

Oh okay, I think I misunderstood part of what's happening. So it's not new content being added just for the three year/life time subscribes, but current content being restricted/taken away? If that's the case then I completely agree with the outrage. But still stand by my points in a general, not-specific to this situation sense.

ayrt

No, it is new content, but that is something that you need to tell people about upfront when they are buying their subscriptions, especially when that content isn't the kind of thing that you could call an extra perk (like, merchandise, exclusive chats with the writers, whatever), but the kind of thing you absolutely are expecting to receive when you pay for a subscription to a paywall site (full coverage of Pittsburgh sports). It's not that a Patreon-like model is inherently wrong, it's that you need to tell people upfront what they are/aren't getting before they pay.

I mean, good for your points in general, I guess, but no one's been contesting them and they're sort of totally beside the point in this situation. No one who's already been paying for content needs to be told that content costs money.

NA

What gets me is that it doesn't even seem like a very smart business model lol.

I think if nothing else, this venture has demonstrated what a wide range of things DK is bad at: journalism, business, PR.

You can't change terms of service on people with no warning. They should have been informed ahead of time there would be content not available to one-year subscribers. This just sounds like a last-minute ploy to get people to extend their subscriptions — and honestly, if they are resorting to that, I'd be worried they weren't going to be around in 3 years for me to get my money's worth anyway.

what's this foam brick cash grab he references?

don't know for sure, but googling "foam brick cash grab" and picking the link that looked most relevant off the first page of results gave me this post from last year.

http://www.voy.com/158430/21404.html

among other things (you'll have to scroll through the post if you want to read the full details but i tried to provide a reasonable summary of potentially relevant info):

a--the "foam brick" thing definitely was a cash grab. he deletes comments that don't contain profanity/other offensive language but *do* contain criticism, including a subscriber comment made when he first floated the idea of the $50 brick. That subscriber works at a non-profit and knows firsthand that the brick idea is a no-no for a for-profit company.

it's fine as a *non-profit* thing because if a legit by IRS standards charity/non-profit sells $50 foam bricks as a fund-raiser, people can claim most of that as a charitable contribution on their taxes if they're itemizing deductions and the charity provides them with whatever paperwork may be necessary. (if you're *getting* something for making a donation, normally you can only deduct the difference between your donation and the theoretical fair market value of that something. so if the fair market value of the foam brick is $5, this would probably be a $45 deduction, not a $50 one. or at least that's how they explained it to me in tax preparer training.)

with a for-profit set-up, you're essentially paying $50 for merch worth about $5 tops *and* can't claim a deduction so cash grab is a pretty accurate description imo.

b--the first commenter claims dk's site is operating very much on a month-to-month basis and that travel expenses for last year's SCF were *definitely* a strain on the operating budget.

c--dk expanded more quickly than he should have and is in financial trouble partly because of that.

d--he's arguably made poor personnel decisions (at least last year he apparently had both a multimedia director and a social media person who may or may not have been getting paid and i assume was taylor haase of tumblr notoriety, but the site doesn't really have enough video to need a full-time multimedia person and it sounds like their twitter could probably have been bundled into somebody else's job duties as well.)

e--somebody else said "Oh, and also........the rumors that he lets people go via text message is 100% TRUE."

That comment thread was a great read for schadenfreude.

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Deke Dangle RPF Anon

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#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

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