Re:Using Zipcar may damage your credit
by barrkel on Sunday September 19, 2010 @03:47PM
(#1706786)
I expect the cost to Zipcar is that they rely on oversubscription and underuse, a bit like porn sites.
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I guess it depends who you are but wouldn't porn sites be overuse and undersubscription?
No. As I understand it, porn sites depend on recurring subscriptions that people forget to cancel. If it were overuse and undersubscription, they wouldn't be profitable.
This is true. As I said in the porn thread, I used to work at a large porn company. One time we had about 3 weeks of significant intermittent downtime, due to a really bad server migration.
I suggested that we send out an email to the subscribers offering a one-month credit if they wanted it, and the management looked at me like I was crazy. When I asked why, they explained that if we sent an email like that out, it would remind the members to cancel their subscriptions.
That was a big part of my inspiration to create the "iTunes Store for porn" application.