Black hat vs white hat SEO in content marketing

Back in 2015, Adam Conover, a comedian and writer for CollegeHumor, launched a new show on TruTV called Adam Ruins Everything.

True to its name, Adam Ruins Everything set out to “ruin” things we think are good by showing us exactly how they’re bad or doing harm. The show was about shattering illusions — investigative journalism you can laugh about.

A few years removed from college, Adam Ruins Everything was a revelation, not just opening my eyes to new ideas, but giving me a new perspective on topics I thought I already knew a lot about.

That’s all to say, when Conover covers a topic, especially one that hits as close to home as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I’m here to listen!

Yesterday, while scrolling Threads, I came across a new video from Adam on “how Google RUINED the internet.” If you’ve got 20 minutes (which I’m sure you do if you found yourself here) it’s worth the watch.

If you’re a content marketer or anyone who cares about SEO, it’s a must watch.

Google is broken and so is SEO

As Conover points out in his video, Google has created a vicious cycle that’s quickly destroyed the open web.

The idea here goes like this:

• Google started as a search engine.

• Its market insight/advantage was showing you relevant websites based on how those websites linked to one another.

• Once Google cornered the market, they turned into an advertiser (that’s what all those sponsored links are and why you get product/flight results directly in search).

• To organically compete with ads that take up most of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you’ll need to rank in the top 10 of search results. In the past, ranking lower than 10 would put you on an entirely separate page, but that was before Google adopted the infinite scroll.

• Google, understanding this incentive, puts out guidelines on how to optimize your content for its search engine.

• This leads to a ton of bad behavior from those trying to game the system and has directly led to the spammy, crap-tastic search results we see today.

Now, add in artificial intelligence and you not only accelerate the vicious cycle, but you effectively break the internet. Because, if people can’t find your website on the most popular search engine that has effectively monopolized the market, does it even really exist?

Black hat vs white hat SEO in content marketing

As a consumer of the world wide web, watching Adam’s video enraged me as I hope it would anyone who relies on the internet for information.

As a content marketer, it’s frustrating to watch to say the least.

Whether we like it or not, SEO is a part of what we do as content marketers — a necessary evil.

In order to grow brand awareness and top-of-funnel pipeline, you need people to know who you are. There are other ways to do that, yes, like social and earned media. But if you’re responsible for organic traffic, you can’t afford to turn your back on Google. This is how monopolies work.

That said, there are two paths to travel here. To steal a term from my more technical friends, you can either deploy black hat or white hat tactics.

Black hat SEO

If you want to end up in the sequel to Conover’s video essay above, black hat SEO is the path for you.

Like a drug, black hat SEO offers potentially cheap highs … but be wary of the come down, because rock bottom is a lot further than you think.

Ok, enough of the metaphor.

Black hat SEO is about hacking Google’s algorithm in order to game SERPs for valuable keywords. Black hat SEO is typically tied to some sort of short-term financial incentive. To borrow the example Conover covers in his video: affiliate links where third-party websites get paid to send traffic to ecommerce sites.

Black hat SEO is the reason it is so difficult to find reliable product reviews and why we’ve seen a proliferation of junk in SERPs.

Generative AI makes it easier than ever to turn Google’s SEO guidelines into a template for crap, which makes it even more difficult for good content to break through.

Gaming Google’s algorithm can skyrocket you to the top of SERPs and lead to a flood of traffic, but there’s consequences attached to this.

First and foremost, you’re now engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Google who is constantly updating its algorithm not only to close the holes you’ve exploited, but to actively punish you for it.

Furthermore, black hat SEO isn’t concerned with relevant traffic, but rather traffic for traffic’s sake. Black hat SEOs will always look to expand your content scope, sometimes far outside of what’s relevant to your readers, in order to capture adjacent keywords with high search volume.

Black hat SEO might work in the short term to boost traffic, but these tactics will ultimately lead to higher bounce rates, lower time on page, and far less engagement — three signals that will have Google decreasing your authority in search and eventually down ranking your site until it’s invisible.

White hat SEO

Not all SEO is about smoke and mirrors and not every content marketer is here to contribute to the downfall of the web.

Quite the contrary.

In a perfect world, content marketers are a key contributor of quality content to the internet. Our goals should be to help our readers learn how to do their jobs better, understand their market and space more clearly, or gain new perspectives on topics important to them and/or their business, to name just a few.

Notice how SEO is absent from each of those editorial visions? That’s because in white hat SEO, the data we have about keywords and search queries is there to support and amplify our strategy, it is not the be all, end all.

The way I like to think about it is that SEO never dictates what you write or how you write it, but it should inform each piece of content you touch.

Just as we should never create content for the sake of creating content, we shouldn’t create content because the keyword data says we might be able to capture a few hundred searches a month by doing so.

Rather, white hat SEO is about taking the important topic you just wrote about for your readers and making sure it’s as visible as possible for them in SERPs.

Technical SEO is a great example of an area where white hat SEOs can shine by ensuring you have a concise and relevant SEO headline, making sure the meta description matches the content on the page, making the slug easy to read, and adding alt texts to all of your images.

All of these are SEO best practices that help make it easier to find what you write, without compromising the quality of the content that your readers will consume.

The issue with white hat SEO is that it can be a slow build. Identifying and writing quality content that your readers care about takes time and sometimes the most engaging content only appeals to a small sliver of your target audience.

But where white hat SEO lacks in speed it makes up for tenfold in sustainability. White hat SEO is the best way to consistently attract quality traffic to your website that not just feeds top of funnel, but makes it through to close.

In many ways, the struggle between white and black hat SEO is the struggle between quality vs quantity, and speed vs sustainability.

Learn more about leveraging SEO in your content marketing strategy

As long as Google exists, there will be a need to optimize your content for search results.

But “being first on Google” is not a content marketing strategy.

If you’re serious about content marketing, deepening connections with your customers, and building sustainable organic traffic for your website, the only path forward is white hat SEO.

Learn more and ask questions about leveraging SEO in your content marketing strategy by dropping me a line, today!

Three types of content marketing strategies every startup should consider

Content marketing, for startups especially, can be a bit of a Rorschach Test.

For some, the term is synonymous with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and influencer types like Neil Patel — who promise hockey-stick growth if you just follow these awesome new hacks!

But for those who have been in the content marketing trenches for the last decade, like myself, content marketing is the heart and soul of modern, digital marketing.

Content marketers are often some of the most skilled and adaptable markets within a team and have to be able to handle copywriting, branding, strategy, process, measurement, and execution. They need to be able to work by themselves and cross functionally with subject matter experts both within and outside of the marketing department.

For startups, content marketing is about building long-term, sustainable, organic growth for your brand that leads to higher-converting prospects down funnel, while also playing a supporting role for sales and paid channels.

If that sounds like a lot, it is, which is why strategy is so important.

Research shows that companies that document and write down their content strategy are nearly 30% more successful than those that don’t.

Before you can document your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to choose a path to start on. To help, let’s review some of the most common (and most successful) content marketing strategies every startup should consider today.

Content marketing strategies for startups

The typical startup marketing evolution goes something like this:

• We need an online presences → Builds a website

• Our website needs traffic → Starts posting on social channels

• Our website needs more traffic → Starts a blog

• What do we put on our blog?

The first press release and product updates are easy enough to identify as fodder for your blog, but once the low hanging fruit has been picked, where do you go?

Good content marketers know that there needs to be reason and intent behind every piece of content they create, be it blogs, social posts, or gated assets. A good content marketing strategy should be the place where your team turns to when they ask themselves, “Why am I writing this?”.

With that in mind, there are a few basic things every content marketing strategy needs to include. Rather than reiterate these for each strategy, keep in mind that these basics apply to all strategies. Those are:

• Buyer personas: The buyer persona answers the question, “Who am I speaking to?”. A good buyer persona should include typical titles, motivations, frustrations, needs and work challenges. It should also include relevant information such as how technical the person is, where they live in the buying cycle/committee, and how they’d like to be marketed to.

• Goals: Every content creation process should begin with the action you want the reader to take. Goals will heavily depend on where the piece of content you create lives in the marketing funnel. For example, the goal of top of funnel content is typically awareness, middle of funnel content aims to drive engagement with the brand/product, while bottom of funnel content should initiate the sales cycle.

• Distribution channels: A good strategy will tell you when and why you should create content, but a complete strategy will also include where and how that content gets distributed. The majority of your content will be published on your blog and posted to social media, but how do you get eyeballs to your content beyond that. Every strategy should include third-party distribution systems and, if paid channels are a part of the strategy, a budget for placing content outside of owned properties.

Given this context, let’s look at three common content marketing strategies you should consider deploying as a startup.

SEO-driven content marketing

For some, SEO and content marketing are inseparable — so much so that many still run their entire content strategies based on the data they get from their SEO tools.

The idea behind SEO content marketing is simple: Your buyers already know the content they want and need to consume, and there are tools available that can give us insight into exactly what keywords and questions they’re searching.

These tools, like SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs, can tell you roughly how often a keyword is searched each month, whether that traffic is looking to buy or research a topic, and how difficult it will be to write new content that ranks for that keyword.

New AI capabilities, like those deployed by SEMRush, can take the data a step further and show you how content and ideas are clustered together into larger content pillars.

In an SEO-driven content strategy, the first step is building a keyword list. Startups with intimate knowledge of their buyers might have a good idea of what some of those keywords are, and SEO tools can help you build that list out by exposing you to related keywords, for example.

If you’re not sure where to start with your research, a good place to start is with a competitor gap analysis. SEO tools not only provide information on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), they also provide information on what keywords are helping a particular site earn traffic. By analyzing your competitors, you can easily identify common keywords that you’ll want to compete on, as well as gaps where opportunities exist for you to gain a competitive advantage.

A content marketer can then take a keyword list and ideate topics to satisfy said keywords, making it relatively easy to build out a content calendar.

SEO-driven strategies are great because they give us data to work off of. Why should we prioritize writing Topic A over Topic B? Well, Topic A gets 500 more searches per month, and has a keyword difficulty of 20/100 vs Topic B’s keyword difficulty of 80/100.

SEO-drive content marketing also gives you an idea of where your path will lead. If your strategy includes targeting keywords with a combined search traffic of 1,000 searches/month, you can expect it to outperform a strategy whose keywords only capture a combined 500 searches per month.

That said, it’s important to note the real risks that come with running an SEO-only strategy in 2024 and beyond.

First and foremost, search is experiencing its most dramatic shift in over a decade with the advent of AI. Even those outside of SEO have seen recent headlines of the mess AI has made out of Google search results — telling searchers to add glue to their pizza if the sauce is runny and how many rocks they should be eating each day.

Beyond AI-generated results, Google’s SERPs have been unreliable for months, with algorithm updates having unintended consequences that have dealt serious damage to sites that prioritize the kind of content that Google says it wants to promote.

For years, Google has said it will prioritize what it calls EEAT content or content that follows the guidelines of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Some websites, like HouseFresh, offer EEAT content in the form of rigorous, scientifically backed product reviews. Unfortunately, in recent years, product reviews and their affiliate links have exposed a major hole in the EEAT algorithm.

By leveraging AI, formerly trustworthy sources like CNET, are milking the product review/affiliate link cash cow and destroying Google search results for retail products in the process. Google, in trying to fix this bug in the system, issued an algorithm update that ultimately tanked quality websites like HouseFresh.

AI has only accelerated Google's tinkering with its search results, making an all-in approach to SEO one of the riskiest strategies a content marketer can deploy today, especially for a startup.

Sales-driven content marketing

If you’re not too keen on putting all of your eggs in the SEO basket, one of the next best places you can turn to as a content marketer is your sales team.

Content marketing, and marketing in general, is always more successful when it works hand-in-hand with sales — a reminder to always build strong relationships with your sales org.

In a sales-driven content marketing strategy, your No. 1 goal is to reduce friction in the sales funnel.

Doing so requires that we as content marketers get closer to our buyers, and the best way to do that is through conversations with sales.

Since sales speaks with our customers everyday, they’re the closest thing the marketing org has to ground truth.

With that in mind, the sales-driven strategy begins with what I call quarterly content check-ins. A quarterly content check-in is a 1:1 conversation where the content marketer can interview the sales associate about the interactions they’ve had with customers over the last quarter.

During these check-ins content marketers should ask questions like:

• What was the easiest sale you had last quarter and what made it so easy?

• What was your most difficult sale you had last quarter and what made it most challenging?

• Tell me about a sale you lost where you feel things could have gone better if the customer was better informed …

• What piece of content do you use most frequently during the sales process?

• What’s a piece of content that you wish you had?

• What’s a piece of information that would make a sale easier if the prospect knew it beforehand?

• What’s the most difficult concept you have to explain to customers?

• Who is the easiest person to sell to?

• Who is the hardest person to sell to?

• What’s something prospects are typically confused about/don’t understand about our brand before a call?

While there’s more you can add here, these questions should provide a great starting point to a conversation that should help you better understand the sorts of questions and knowledge gaps that are creating friction in your sales funnel.

(NOTE: Make these meetings more impactful by providing these questions in a Google Form beforehand. This ensures everyone will be ready and on the same page for the meeting and gives you even more room to cover follow up questions, without expanding beyond a 30-min check-in!)

For the best results, content marketers should schedule these meetings with as many individuals in sales that’s feasible. In a small startup, that might only be three or four individuals, but in larger orgs, that number could quickly balloon into the teens and 20s. If you find yourself at a larger org, it’s important to schedule check-ins with each level of your sales org: i.e. the head of sales, at least one manager, at least one associate, at least one business developer, at least one Sales Development Representative (SDR), etc. This will ensure you get a good idea of how sales is interacting with customers at every level of the funnel.

From here you can compare responses and identify common needs among the sales org, making it easier to ideate content and prioritize topics.

Strategies like these are great because they help content marketers get at the topics and ideas that are closest to the dollar. These types of strategies also help foster communication and collaboration between sales and marketing, making for a stronger go-to-market org.

Challenger content marketing

What if you’re not keen on going all in on SEO but you’re also the only marketer at a startup and the sale’s org is similarly a team of one? In this scenario, a sales-based content marketing strategy likely won’t bear fruit.

The challenger approach to marketing/sales is a B2B concept, but one that can easily be adapted to B2C for content marketing. Given its origins, I’ll explain the concept through its B2B roots before getting to its B2C adaptability.

B2B challenger content marketing

In B2B sales and marketing, the challenger approach is easy to understand: In business, individuals don’t buy technology, committees do. The challenger approach is about identifying the individuals in this committee, as well as the upwards of 60% of the information they’ll consume on their own before ever entering a sales call. With this information, a sales and marketing org can then set about dominating that 60% of information their buyers are seeking, making for a more efficient sales cycle.

While the challenger approach is similar to a sales-driven content marketing strategy in that it requires the close cooperation of sales, it can also involve greater cross-departmental collaboration because it’s about optimizing the buyer journey instead of the sales journey.

In a B2B buying committee, there are at least three buyers you’ll need to optimize for:

• The talker: These are members of the buying committee that can be most helpful in that they will readily offer up information to help you sell them. Unfortunately, since the talker is often only interested in themselves, you’ll need to tailor your content to their needs. If the talker is an individual contributor — someone who will be directly using your product, hands on keyboard — this should be as easy as reiterating value props. The real challenge comes from when the talker is only tangentially involved with the day-to-day use of the product.

• The blocker: Self-explanatory enough, the blocker is resistant to change. This can be especially painful for a go-to-market org when the blocker is the user of a technology you’re trying to replace. When we think of the challenge of the blocker, we have to think about presenting the status quo as unacceptable. As a former CMO once told me, our goal is to show that “the pain of the same is greater than the pain of change.”

• The mover: Also known as the mobilizer, the mover is someone who, despite a healthy skepticism, can identify the greater good and get people on board internally. The mover is the only member of the committee that can (and will try to) change the opinions on others. If you’ve already lost a talker or blocker, you’re dead in the water without a mover on board.

Each of these buyers has their own journey; They’ll each become aware of your company through different means, want to learn different things about what you offer and where you provide value, and will have different triggers throughout the sales funnel. In B2B challenger content marketing, your goal is to create content that satisfies all three phases, for all three types of buyer.

B2C challenger content marketing

While a B2B concept, the challenger approach can also be adapted to B2C marketing and sales.

The difference here is, rather than selling to a committee, you’re selling to an individual.

The principal that remains is information consumption before a sale. Think about the last time you bought anything for the first time — chances are you did a bit of Googling beforehand and likely read a number of reviews.

B2C buyers, just like their business counterparts, want to feel informed about what they’re buying. While the amount of info they consume before a sale is likely higher than 60% (considering how common it is to buy without ever talking to a sales person, or even walking into a salesroom/floor) the challenge of dominating that information is still the same.

By mapping out your typical buying journey(s) you can match content to each stage of the journey.

Learn more about content marketing strategy

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working as a content marketer for startups over the last ten years, it’s that adaptability is key.

Just because you have a documented strategy with buy-in today, doesn’t mean that same strategy will fit your organization come next quarter.

One of the exciting things about working in the startup space is “building the rocket ship while you’re flying it.” These organizations move fast and are able to generate a ton of data, and that typically leads to pivots and changes in strategies when appropriate.

Having three, reliable strategies in your back pocket will help you set yourself up for success today, and when things inevitably change in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about content marketing strategy, or talk about your startups options, message me today.

'Click to subscribe, call to cancel' and corporate America's resentment of consumers

At some point at the start of each year, right around tax time, my wife and I will begrudgingly put together our annual budget.

As adults in our 30s, this shouldn’t be a problem. But each year’s budget inevitably reveals some sort of headache.

This year, that headache came in the form of call-to-cancel subscriptions.

At-home gym cancellations are still gym cancellations

Back in 2020, as the pandemic began to spread and the world was shutting down, my wife and I realized that we'd become quite sedentary. As two young professionals who worked in the city and commuted via public transportation, we did quite a bit of walking each day.

With covid shutting everything down, however, the only walking we got in each day was with our dog Murphy.

The holidays were approaching, and with the stress of the pandemic and all the adjustments that came along with suddenly becoming a remote worker, neither of us was really in the mood to figure out Christmas shopping.

Instead, we thought it would make sense to “invest” in a bit of self-improvement in the form of a Tempo Studio.

Tempo is a cool little company. Located in San Francisco, Tempo’s mission is “to give everyone the power to realize their strength and lead an active, full life.”

The product we bought was the Tempo Studio, an at-home gym system with an easel-looking vertically-mounted screen, a built-in infrared camera and storage for weights and dumbbells.

With the Tempo Studio (which typically retails at nearly $3,000) and a monthly subscription ($41.44/month) you can take a wide range of live and on-demand fitness classes. Not only do you get the benefit of guided workouts, but the infrared camera actively watches your posture and provides the same types of corrections a personal trainer would. It can also tell exactly how much weight you have on your dumbbell without needing to manually adjust settings through the Studio’s touch screen.

If this sounds like the future of at-home fitness, it’s because in a lot of ways it truly is. But go to cancel your subscription and you’ll quickly realize it’s just like any other gym.

While it took near minutes for my wife and I to click around the their website, spend thousands of dollars on a Tempo Studio, and register for a monthly subscription, canceling wasn’t nearly as easy.

To start, I couldn’t easily find a cancellation option within the Tempo app or within my account settings online. (I've been told these options exist, but I'm dubious.) When I finally found an option to pause my membership, I was forced into an instant message with a sales rep.

Given how much I liked Tempo — despite being sold faulty equipment that I later had to fix with the help of a Tempo IT specialist via Zoom — I was willing to pause. But upon learning I could only pause my membership for 3 months, at which point the billing would automatically resume, I decided to just go ahead and cancel.

Unfortunately, the sales rep informed me, this meant that I would have to be transferred to a senior sales rep, all of who, apparently, were busy at that moment. If I left my number, I was told, it would be at least 24 hours before they could call me back.

At this point, I did what I had been dreading from the start. I decided to call them myself. After all, there’s no way every senior associate was busy for the rest of the day. After going through an automated system and another junior (I’m guessing?) sales rep, I reached the final boss.

Holding times included, it took me well over an hour out of my Sunday just to cancel a subscription that took me a minute to sign up for.

I was pissed off and exhausted. The sales reps were all perfectly nice and I did my best to stay calm throughout the whole process. But I was left feeling dirty. Like I had been abused by a system designed to trap me into a membership indefinitely, and I had just barely gotten out of it.

It left me feeling like the companies I had chosen to do business with weren’t happy to do business with me. In fact, it felt like they were down right hostile towards me.

Everything is horrible

When it comes to shopping in America, two things are dramatically different today from what they were even 10 or 20 years ago. Those two things are 1) the quality of the goods we purchase and 2) businesses’ attitude toward consumers.

The downward trend in the quality of the goods we consume is longstanding, but feels like it’s rapidly accelerated in recent years.

This trend goes back to an old idea of consumer engineering. Vox’s Kimberly Mas has a great explainer video on this in her post on “Why everything you buy is worse right now.”

In it, Mas discusses the origins of consumer engineering, an idea invented by Earnest Elmo Calkins in the 1930s. The most basic way to think of consumer engineering is in today’s terms of planned obsolescence—or the idea that products are built with their eventual (planned) breakdown in mind.

Under consumer engineering, the greatest profits can only be achieved through the acceleration of replacement cycles. Mas highlights fast fashion as such an example. But these artificially fast replacement cycles aren’t unique to the fashion and clothing industry.

In technology, Moore’s law set the table for equally fast upgrade cycles.

While a bit more technical, Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. In laymen’s terms, it's an observation about just how much more powerful computers get with each new processor generation.

In the early days of smartphones and mass-market laptops, Moore’s law was easily observed. Consumers could feel the difference between the computer they bought two years prior, and the one they coveted at the computer store today.

But as smartphones went from telephones with a few cool features, to literal super computers that fit in our pockets, the gap between each generation became smaller and smaller. However, despite these decreased leaps in power and efficiency, the acceleration of replacement cycles hasn't ceased.

Even though computers aren’t improving as fast as they once did, and clothes seem to fall apart quicker than ever before, companies continue to pour marketing dollars into manufacturing increasingly shorter trend cycles.

At the same time, their tolerance for consumers has seemingly shrunk to the point of disappearance. Technology has allowed businesses to distance themselves from the consumers they rely on. And consistent consumer demand in the face of an ever-shrinking standard of quality has left these executives feeling as if they can sell you garbage and get away with it.

Subscribe to hostility

The internet has transformed our economy in ways our parents could have never fathomed and in ways that still seem impossible to many.

But as we’ve abandoned main streets for IP addresses, we’ve also eliminated the contact businesses once had with their customers.

Some of that dislocation is good. It’s allowed for incredible services, like online streaming and the ability to seamlessly download digital content, to exist. But it’s also, to some extent, taken away the accountability that was implicit in a face-to-face transaction.

In an article for the William & Mary Business Law Review titled “Canceling Difficult Cancellation: An Analysis of Recent Regulatory Efforts to Make Canceling Subscriptions Easier,” Carter McCants argues that the rise of subscription services has led many of such businesses down a path that’s resulted in the shattering of the core economic principle of voluntary exchange.

Voluntary exchange is a simple idea in economics that says, in any transaction, both parties have the chance to agree or deny said transaction. For example, if you go to a grocery store and buy a banana, McCants said, that’s an example of voluntary exchange. But if you subscribe to a banana subscription service, and then can’t cancel in time to deny your next delivery, that’s a much different story.

This type of exchange, where only one part is still voluntary to the transaction, has flourished in the age of the modern subscription service.

As McCants points out, “the subscription-based economy is projected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025, which is more than double its 2021 valuation.”

While many subscriptions are voluntarily purchased, subscription companies deploy a number of dark patterns to lock consumers into services long after they’ve agreed or, often, even know they’re still subscribed.

As per McCants research:

According to a 2017 survey, more than one-third of Americans have enrolled in a subscription service, like a gym membership, without even knowing it. From 2017 to 2019, consumers filed more than 50,000 complaints about free trials to the Better Business Bureau in the United States and Canada. In total, consumers have lost well over $1.4 billion on free trials, with a median loss of $140 per victim.

First and foremost, as outlined above, paying for a service you didn’t know you were paying for is, in itself, a violation of voluntary exchange. But beyond that, the fact that so many Americans (as many as 33 percent) are victims of this "involuntary" exchange is alarming.

The reason these consumers get unknowingly trapped into subscriptions is due to what are called dark patterns.

Dark patterns are manipulative user interfaces that are intentionally designed to trick users into actions they might not take otherwise. According to McCants, the favorite dark patterns of subscription services include:

• Click-to-subscribe, call-to-cancel

• Complicated navigation interfaces

• Deceptive wording

• Confusing options

• Free trials

While everyone encounters dark patterns, they’re especially effective when deployed on children and elderly users.

Click-to-cancel dark patterns

As I sat there waiting to speak with a human after Tempo’s automated system put me on hold, I began to wonder, “how is this legal?”

To my surprise, however naive that may be, I learned that there’s no rules stopping this type of behavior from subscription-based (or really any kind of) company.

However, in the last year, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed a new rule that would put these sorts of click-to-subscribe, call-to-cancel schemes to rest, as well as many of their dark pattern counterparts.

The “Click-to-Cancel” rule would force companies to make it at least as easy to cancel a subscription or membership as it was to subscribe in the first place.

After the FTC proposed the rule in 2023, it was widely praised by consumers, who took to the FTC comments section to share their stories of encounters with dark patterns.

Equally as predictable as consumer support for the proposed rule, was the swarm of trade associations that came out to oppose it; and to do so by trying to claim only they have the best interest of consumers at heart. 

Notably, the Entertainment Software Association, Association of National Advertisers, and The News/Media Alliance, each submitted statements that all amounted to some version of “consumers aren’t smart enough to handle a click-to-cancel system” or “it’s too expensive to build such a system, and we’d have to charge consumers more as a result.”

One of my “favorite” trade arguments, via the Wall Street Journal:

“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the advertisers’ group said in its comments on the proposal.

Inadvertent cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they didn’t intend to cancel in the first place, the ANA said.

This, of course, is offensive. Why must all the burden be placed on consumers? Surely, the same systems that warn about accidentally deleting something from a content management system can be applied here.

It’s further proof that these companies care more about profits than doing right by their customer. It’s a tacit admission that if, for example, a consumer relies on you for food or medicine, you’d take no special care to ensure they meant to cancel their subscription when you saw said cancellation come through. In this regard, the customer is never right.

Equally ridiculous was this tidbit from a similar report in Wired:

[NCTA CEO Michael] Powell also said the cost of complying [with the FTC’s proposed click-to-cancel rule]—including retraining employees and maintaining records for longer than current practice—could force cable companies to raise prices.

In the age of greedflation, it’s laughable to think that “burdensome” rules (aka, rules crafted to protect consumers) are the reason corporations have been raising their prices. Further, the charge coming from an individual who represents cable companies—an industry that’s been disrupted by streaming services which all provide click-to-cancel functions—is painfully ironic.

At the end of the day, a rule that would force companies to make canceling services as easy as subscribing to services, is a rule that is against dark patterns. And for companies that rely on those dark patterns, like gyms (at home or otherwise), this pro-consumer rule is unacceptable.

In that regard, the FTC's proposal and the backlash to it from Big Business, especially in the face of consumers who cheered the rule proposal, is a microcosm of the current state of our economy where companies rely on consumers for survival, but resent them all the same in the process.