Cartoon 745: What am I paying for?

Business models are the operations road map of a company. The road should inevitably arrive at profits. Some companies go for years before arriving at the profit destination. Others never reach it.

Traditionally the road to profits is paved by a successful product in the marketplace. Particularly in America, this is not always the case in arriving at profits. One strategy that is decoupled from a product or service is “patent squatting”. In other words, a company trying to patent everything as broadly as possible, never producing a product based on the patent. This is where the lawyers come in suing to extort revenue from other companies under the nebulous heading of “patent infringement”. Microsoft has a potentially landmark case before the Supreme Court attempting to challenge the issuing of a broad patent by the government.

Another strategy for profits increasingly has been advertisements. But the easy dollars of advertisements are not in a symbiotic relationship anymore with the product of service. Things have reversed. The product of service is the unwelcome annoyance viewed by executives and Investors. It is a cost to their business model. The subscription fees represent merely the market size and demographics for charging for advertisements. Therefore it is no wonder that the “content” of these products or services are getting smaller and smaller, while the advertisements are growing more numerous. These businesses are also curtailing the quality of the content by eliminating the higher priced employees that generate the better content. At the same time they are raising subscription fees.

Today I find myself in the position of subsidizing advertisement with my subscriptions. It is no longer the other way around where advertisements subsidize the product.

There are only two magazines that immediately come to mind that depend completely on subscriptions. One is “Consumer Reports” and the other is “American Test Kitchen”.

I think it is a travesty to pay to receive all these undesired advertisements.