Offering consumers a free service and then converting them to paid customers has long been a retail marketing tactic _ whether through a free issue of a magazine, a short-term fee waiver on a credit card or a shampoo sample handed out in a drugstore.
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Stephen Sutton, the executive director of consumer marketing at Ziff-Davis Publishing, said that if less than 50 percent of subscribers did not fulfill their payments, then Time Inc . risked sending out millions of free issues to people who never intended to pay their bills, or " bad-pay copies ."
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At first, the only payment for published material was in the form of coupons for free issues ( subscriptions were on a month-to-month basis, with subscribers enclosing payment for the next issue along with returning disks; the price was $ 5 per issue at first ), though eventually monetary payments were instituted.
