Time Inc.'s Maghound: Potential for Thoroughbred And Not Dog

According to Advertising Age, Time Inc. is introducing a pay-as-you-go, mix-and-match magazine subscription program.

The main problem I see with this is that, in the name of serving readers, you can actually undermine them in the long run. To not just barely succeed, but thrive, you have to give customers not only what they want, but what they didn’t know they wanted. In the middle of letting them choose this and that, why not the occasional short blurb saying, “Given what we’ve seen of what interests you, we think this is an article you’d find interesting. We know it’s not what you might normally pick, but here are the reasons we think you might find it really interesting. Because we value you as a customer, we’re making this particular piece freely available to you. Hope you like it, and let us know with the check-off buttons at the end whether we were right or wrong.” This would be like high end restaurants offering free tastes or little treats available to regular customers. The technology exists to do this, the content exists to do this, so why not just do it? Build a relation and show how you can help direct people to what they’ll find important. It would get around the potential Balkanization of news and eventually strengthen the relationship between publisher and reader.