The Economics of Lying: Getting Free Tech Magazines
Just like many of my tech friends, I subscribe to a number of great tech-related magazines. Some of my favorites include Baseline, e-Week, Information Week, Edge, IT Canada, Communications and Networking, Computing Canada, IT in Government, Small Times (nanotech) and those are just some of the print ones. Add to those the excellent daily e-newsletters from groups like Fierce, VoIP, Wireless, SOX etc.
But as you all know, to get the free subscriptions to these you have to answer a profile survey correctly. If you don’t qualify, or you don’t reside in the US or Canada the subscription price is in the hundreds $.
So for those of you who get these magazines, you know the typical questions, what’s your position? CEO? CIO? What’s your company’s annual revenue? It’s gotta start at least at a million or 10 million. How much are you going to spend on servers next year? $500k?? When are you going to be replacing your storage equipment? Are you the final decision maker? It goes on and on, so if you’re like me you just click on the ‘whatever’ answers just to get through it.
I just don’t get the purpose of these surveys. If you’re the final decision maker on everything your company isn’t pulling in $100M in revenue. So to get through these horrible surveys. I just click random answers. I’ve polled 4 friends who have similar subscriptions and all just make up answers to get through the survey. That’s 5 of 5. Better stats than dentists!
I don’t think anyone is trying to be deceptive but these surveys are poorly designed, intimidating and/or not-applicable to many people. I’d probably be horrified to find out how this ‘data’ is used and interpreted.
Those surveys are a real joke. I always select the highest figures – >100,000 employees, >$1 billion revenues etc.
I sincerely hope that such data is not used in a real-world business context.