I love LWN's content. It includes soooo much detailed technical coverage on many interesting conferences. It's a great way to stay vaguely aware of what's happening in various subindustries.<p>It's extremely frustrating how many steps it takes to subscribe.<p>There are so many places to drop out of the signup process (especially when you don't already have an account).<p>The first time I meant to subscribe, I got distracted by something halfway through and ended up not subscribing for 3 months.<p>After clicking the call to action , it should basically immediately present a "sign up and subscribe" form, complete with credit card collection.<p>It would be a massive shame to be at the limit of sustainability because of something like this
LWN is a class act. Most subscription services make you jump through hoops to cancel your subscription. Not LWN though. It is the only media subscription that I've seen that doesn't automatically renew when your payment term is up.<p>This makes me feel like LWN really respects their customers.
I never subscribed or even visited LWN on my own, but their content sharing is something that every paid news outlet should take a note of. Your subscribers should be able to share the content they paid for with their friends, colleagues, whatever without copy-pasting it. Limit it by visits or time (or both) if you are worried. Do NOT ask for emails before showing the article to visitors.
LWN has an enterprise subscription model (I think). I work for Hewlett Packard and login using corporate account. The enterprise model is not well advertised/known.<p>Just saying so if someone here wants to get their company to subscribe, then it's win-win for LWN and your employees.
I used to be a subscriber for LWN for like 17 years. It was so nice to be able to look only once a week to their site and got all important stuff in a nice format. I let my subscription to expire when they started to move to daily news format with less focus of their high-quality weekly issues. I have found that it brought extra noise distracting from more important issues.