Comment Re:Boiling the Frog with an Occasional Ice Cube (Score 1) 172
I do not want to get into long lecture type ranting, but in short, online ads are not reliable revenue streams, you need click records or some percent of the length of ad to be watched by user without backing out, thus they tend to oscillate and different than subscriber fees which is paid regularly as long as subscriber does not get irritated enough to cancel service (and ads are the greatest irritator), this is one.
And the other is with subscription type services, which by their nature very routine, your customer become accustomed to see you name on the credit card bill and do not question the amount etc.the most dangerous thing to do is to change the service, even if it is reducing cost or adding some "free gift" to the package.
For example an ISP I used to work, which was also providing a free e-mail service to customers, once added an alias domain to our primary domain, thus (marketing dreamed) they would add a new value to the service at no cost to company and at no cost to customers, for advertisement... I might be wrong, but I seem to remember we lost more than 10% users to a competitor, and leaving customers kept their "free" mail addresses, all because customers had problems while configuring alias domain to their mail clients. So we and up with serving customers, while they are paying to our competitor. It is dangerous to shake regular subscription services.