Weekly News Roundup
1. Lynk & Co raises prices with 10 percent in face of customer complaints – Dagens industri
Service shortcomings and non-working functions have made customers complain loudly about the car subscription brand Lynk & Co in Sweden. When the brand now raises the monthly cost by over 10 percent despite the problems remaning, the criticism is growing, according to Dagens industri.
“We have formed a team now that will solve all these things. We know exactly what it’s about. Everything should work. We have daily meetings and will get all processes started. The next round of tire change should work.”
Read more (English)
Read more (Swedish)
2. Consumers spend an average $133 more each month on subscriptions than they realize, study shows – CNBC
Close to a third of consumers underestimate how much they spend on subscriptions by $100 to $199 each month and many people (42%) have forgotten that they’re still paying for a subscription they no longer use, a new American study shows.
“Consumers’ offhand guess of how much they spend monthly on subscriptions averaged $86, according to a survey commissioned by market research firm C+R Research. Yet when asked about subscriptions in specific categories, the actual amount was $219 on average — $133 more than estimated.”
3. The Jonas Brothers help launch Scriber, a creator subscription company – Techcrunch
Launched in May with the help of former teen heartthrobs The Jonas Brothers, Scriber is a creator subscription company geared toward more established figures in entertainment. Since Scriber is not an app on the App Store, the platform doesn’t have to pay fees to Apple or Google Play. Instead, creators pay Scriber $1 per month for each subscriber.
“Besides catering to more established artists, Scriber differentiates itself from other creator subscription products by functioning solely via SMS. The creator will post a phone number on their social media platforms for fans to text, and after messaging that number, fans can pay a subscription fee via Apple Pay or Stripe to get exclusive content sent to their phone.”
4. Report: Digital subscription economy to grow to 1.5T by 2025 – What’s New in Publishing
The market for digital subscriptions is currently valued at $650B, according to a new report, 2022 Subscription Trends, from Lineup, a subscription management solutions provider. It’s expected to reach $1.5T by 2025—more than double its size today.
“At least one subscription service is now used by 205M Americans, up 13% from 182M in the first quarter of 2020. Last year, subscription commerce sales climbed 41%.”
5. Annoyed users cancel Netflix subscriptions during password sharing test – Business Standard
A Netflix experiment to crack down on password sharing outside of households has left users flummoxed, forcing some of them to cancel their subscriptions, according to Business Standard.
“Overall, the lack of clarity around how Netflix determines a “household” and the differing charges levied on different customers have left subscribers in the test confused, “risking action from consumer regulators”.”
Weekly Analysis Roundup
1. “Is the ‘subscription economy’ going to feel the Netflix effect?” – Financial Times
The pandemic boom in consumer subscriptions could falter as the cost-of-living crisis bites and regulators crack down. Appropriately for a category that got its start in digital media, Netflix is the canary for this squeeze, Helen Thomas writes in an op-ed in Financial Times.
“Boom-time thinking may have bestowed a tech sheen on businesses that were subject to the same pressures around price, quality and customer whim as any other consumer goods outfit. “Investors have liked . . . the recurring revenue stream,” said another VC. “It resembles software as a service.”
2. “How brands are surviving the Great Unsubscribe” – PYMNTS
How companies keep subscribers engaged is the big question for 2022 as they navigate the shoals of inflation, heavy subscription competition and that of reinvented in-store experiences, writes PYMNTS.
“Streaming is faring better than its retail subscription box cousins. According to the latest Subscription Commerce Conversion Index, a PYMNTS and sticky.iocollaboration and taken from a survey of over 1,900 U.S. consumers, the average subscriber has dropped one of their five retail subscriptions since October, putting hard data behind “The Great Unsubscribe.””
3. EYE of the storm: Netflix can only go up from here – Subscribed
“Netflix has been in the news lately and if you had to go by what the reports have been saying, you’d think they’ve led themselves astray and are headed for extinction. That’s ridiculous. Last year, I stated that Netflix could be the first subscription service to hit 1 billion users. And I still stand by that”, writes Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora.
“Today, Netflix’s has three current pricing tiers, all based on one thing: quality. Netflix plans start at $10/month for non-HD content, $15/month for HD, and $20/month for 4K UHD. But there are so many more attributes that Netflix can use. Number of shared accounts, for example. Or they can create bundles of subsets of their content, perhaps by genre, or recency […]”
