Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.

This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.

This sounds interesting, but I cannot understand what you're saying. Could you dumb this down a bit for someone with no experience in marketing/sales?

There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.

If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.

My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.

They are aware of the obvious answer. But they need to be a profitable business.

I'm still confused because I think the word "part" and "model" are used multiple times with different meanings and I can't figure out which is which from context.