We’re Raising Your Subscription Price, But We’ve Updated Our Icon!
Dear, Valued Subscriber:
By now, you’ve probably heard rumors that your monthly subscription price is going to increase. You might be wondering not just if this is true but, if it is true, whether you can expect to receive greater value for your higher fee, or at least the same value, all other things being equal.
I’m writing today to assure you that, yes, we are raising our prices.
Beginning with your next billing cycle, you will be charged $9.99/month for uninterrupted access to our extensive library of content, available across all of your desktop and mobile devices, with no cap on how much you can consume. The only limits are your imagination and whether you have any interest in interacting meaningfully with other human beings or leaving your home/looking away from your digital screen. Even if you pay a little more each month—in this case, two dollars more... just slightly less than the price of half a cup of coffee, if you have a coupon—it’s still a terrific bargain!
We would never expect you to pay more without getting more, though. We genuinely appreciate your business. We know you have options. You could read books or play board games or eat larger or additional meals or sleep longer, but you choose to spend your time browsing our catalog of content—organized according to our proprietary algorithm—at length until you either do or don’t make an actual selection to enjoy, and we’re grateful. We wouldn’t dream of charging you more money simply to get more of your money, even though we know that we would lose only a negligible number of subscribers if we did that, and that we would almost certainly recover all of those subscribers within a week.
Your additional two dollars each month is going to get you something.
Actually, you might already have it. Check your phone, tablet, or even phablet. See the white square where our familiar logo used to be? That’s neither a glitch in the matrix nor a ghost in the machine. That’s our updated mobile identity, and it’s going to make your total experience even better, and more total.
When we sat down and asked ourselves honestly what would justify an abrupt non-negotiable 25% increase in subscription charges effective immediately, we considered a variety of things that we could, in return, do for you. To be frank, none of them seemed good enough or simple enough for our customers. We’ve heard your complaints about our selection of streamable content being overwhelming, so increasing your entertainment alternatives wasn’t even on the table. We thought about making our existing content 25% louder, but federal regulations don’t permit us to do that, as it turns out. So we couldn’t make you hear the difference your money will make, but could we let you see it? Someone suggested a refreshed application icon, and since we’d been brainstorming for two hours already, that idea met with unanimous approval.
Now, why a white square? Because that’s what the famous branding consultant we hired recommended. (We’d love to drop his name, but he’s asked us not to. Besides being in great demand by major companies worldwide, he’s also highly sought after by the law enforcement agencies of multiple nations.) As he explained to our speechless board of directors: “Everything I know about the customers of this multi-billion dollar venture—not to mention all of you here today—says to me white and square. Once I realized that, my mission became clear.”
Our mission has always been clear, of course: to provide the most reliable dissemination of entertainment programming, to produce the highest quality original content, and to change our core business model from time to time without warning or adequate explanation.
Thank you for your continued loyalty, patience, and timely payments.
Matthew David Brozik wrote this and many other short humor pieces, which have been published in print and online by The New Yorker, Adult Swim, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Grin & Tonic, The Big Jewel, and no one.