The obit for the insert card is premature

A brief article in the New York Times claims that blow-in cards for magazines are on the verge of vanishing. Seems like wishful thinking. It won't happen anytime soon.

The article noted that Outside magazine stopped inserting them last year and The Believer has just stopped doing so, saying that "everybody seems to be subscribing online".

Yet, as a recent post here reported that, while it is growing, online new subscriptions were only 22% of gross (and only 14% of total new and renewal subscription sales were expected to come online in 2009.)

People undoubtedly find insert cards, stitched in and blow-in, annoying. Some people ritually remove them before reading. Some, as the NYT writer says he does, may well shake their copies out at the newsstand, leaving the blow-ins to litter the floor, to the consternation of retailers. (Retailers, of course, have more reasons to complain than about litter -- blow-in-cards are printed invitations to buyers to become subscribers and thereby stop buying the magazine from the retailer.)

In fact, economics drive these little cards, because they continue to be a very low cost way of sourcing new subs and one that still has a reasonable return. While the cost-benefit equation leans that direction, predictions about their disappearance are premature. The likelihood of any but a few special interest magazines eliminating them is unlikely unless online subscription reaches a threshold it is nowhere near.