Free Stuff (or not) with Subscription Services

I have 2 goals when it comes to running this website:-

Produce a website which includes special offers, freebies and services which appeal to my visitors
Make a little money from it.

Of the offers and freebies that are available on Lots Of Freebies there are some that I earn a small commission from and there are others where I don’t earn anything from… but while I was looking over a new offer to put up I had to think which of the 2 goals above I valued more.

This was while I was considering promoting the 24-7 SMS Club and after a short while I came to the conclusion I would prefer to have a site with content my visitors found useful rather than earn a quick buck here and there!

The reason that I really dislike this promotion was that it was offering a freebie (105 free texts over 7 days) but if you read the small print you found out that you were signing up to a £4.50 a week subscription service.

This tends to be the type of offer you see all the time for mobile sevices… free ringtones, free wallpapers, free mp3 and these words are always big and bold and the “i agree to a £4.50 a week subscription service” is generally the smallest writing on the page or sometimes hidden away in a FAQ or Terms and Conditions which often gets skipped over in a hurry to get the free stuff.

With this particular promotion there were a number of red flags including:-

The checkbox is automatically ticked during signup and has small writing stating you agree to a £4.50 a week subscription charge.
You have to email in all your personal details, name, address, email, mobile number & a copy of a mobile phone statement to prove you owned the phone. Usually you just enter your mobile number, receive a text messages with a pin code, enter the pin code into the website and you are good to go so why all the additional stuff… identity theft came to mind!
Their second question in the FAQ was “I thought it was a free service, how come I have been charged?” which to me suggests their customers frequently get charged when they think they are getting a free service.
Any friends you send a message to are potentially subjected to advertisement messages (see paragraph below which is taken from their FAQ page)

When you signed up you agreed to the following “By using the Site and our Services you agree that we may select and send up to 2 advertising messages, special offers or invitations per week from you (from your mobile number) to any of the mobile numbers that you send SMS messages to and/or we may add these advertising messages onto the end of messages that you send.”

These days I get enough spam through via stuff that I do and now it sounds like I’m going to have to be watching over the shoulders of my friends all the time to ensure they don’t use my mobile number with services such as this.

Conclusion

At the end of the day this is not the type of offer that my visitors would appreciate and I would most likely annoy them and they would lose faith in the service I’m trying to provide so as a result any freebie that I see with conditions such as this get binned before they get anywhere near our website.

Please let me know your thoughts on these types of services. Have you requested a freebie only to find out that you’ve signed up for a subscription service? Did you get your money back or cut your loses?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Free Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.