Pathfinder 1E Has Paizo been selling my address?

[Kae'Yoss]

What I can say is this. Without advertisers, there would be no Dragon or Dungeon magazines.

Yes, the ads in the magazine are to be expected. But the address being given to other companies, who then proceed to pester one with junk mail, isn't nice. Plus, I think it's illegal to give away someone's address to a third party without their agreement.

Know what I mean?

 

[Soel]

I don't understand people's hate of ads, in snail or e-mail. When did it get so hard not to read them, throw them away, or press delete?

Quite often, ads contain deals that you might actually benefit from. Without their existence, you might not even know there was a certain product available.

I would understand somewhat if one had gotten an ad for something totally unrelated, but this isn't the case with the op's statement.

 

[R-man]

If it is Paizo it is only for those customers who have subscriptions. I have been a customer of Paizo's online store for quite some time and have made at least a dozen seperate purchases from them at their store (mini's which cost too much). I have not recieved anything and I am also a Canadian citizen living in Langley BC, a suburb of Vancouver BC.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I don't understand people's hate of ads, in snail or e-mail. When did it get so hard not to read them, throw them away, or press delete?

It's annoying to sort through your mail for the real letters, be it your regular mail, where you have won 23 times and have to literally dig for that bill, or e-mail, where you have to delete 2401 spam-mails - one after the other, lest you delete a "real" e-mail.

Quite often, ads contain deals that you might actually benefit from. Without their existence, you might not even know there was a certain product available.

So you buy all your perscription drugs online, order women over the net, obtain virility-improving products via e-mail and arrange for breast- and penis enlargement surgery over the world wide web?

 

[Aaron L]

I don't understand people's hate of ads, in snail or e-mail. When did it get so hard not to read them, throw them away, or press delete?

Quite often, ads contain deals that you might actually benefit from. Without their existence, you might not even know there was a certain product available.

I would understand somewhat if one had gotten an ad for something totally unrelated, but this isn't the case with the op's statement.

Ahh, I see you have never gotten 300 spam emails a day from disgusting places.


I had to abandon an old email address because of the junk I kept getting and couldnt filter out.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Ahh, I see you have never gotten 300 spam emails a day from disgusting places.


I had to abandon an old email address because of the junk I kept getting and couldnt filter out.

I periodically have to go into the spam folders of the Critical Miss editor and letters accounts and clear them out, trying to make sure that I find any false positives first. It's a few months since I did this, so I just checked, and the finding is that I have 15,718 mails in the letters spam folder and 10,846 mails in the editor spam folder.

 

[Piratecat]

I just checked, and the finding is that I have 15,718 mails in the letters spam folder and 10,846 mails in the editor spam folder.

Jonny, they're all from me -- I looooove you! Why won't you return my emails?!?!?

James, I just swung by the Paizo site and edited my privacy settings. Those were definitely added after I registered, and were opt out instead of opt in. That's a little iffy; anything added to pre-existing accounts probably should not have been opt-out.

But it was simple to change to "no 3rd party advertisers", so no real harm done for me. I really like and support Paizo, but I have no real interest in supporting ugly fantasy chess set companies.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

They don't tell me the complicated crazy stuff that happens outside of the words or art in the magazines, so I can't say if it was indeed us who pawned out your address. There's countless ways for companies to track down addresses though... magazine subscriptions are certainly one of them, but by no means are they the only places ad agencies go to to farm addresses.

What I can say is this. Without advertisers, there would be no Dragon or Dungeon magazines.

The magazine business is not a good one to get in to if you want to make money; for most magazines, the only profit they actually recieve is from their ad sales. Newsstand and subscription sales generally are enough to cover costs of production and salaries of the staff... if they're lucky.

So feel free to hate the ads. Just understand that they're a part of the process, and without them we'd be trying to pawn $200 yearly subscriptions to the magazine or something crazy like that.

You don't see me complaining about the ads inside the magazine, do you? I understand they're a necessary evil. I also don't find them as intrusive and offensive as direct-marketing. But ads should stay quarantined between the covers of the magazine, and preferably in a separate section near the back (like WotC's quarterly ad supplement, which I use to line my birdcages, since it's coincidentally a great size for it, and careful removal of those pages doesn't damage any actually valuable content).

But still, I've worked in the magazine business for a short time, and I know that subscriptions are essential to the income stream due to guaranteed sales (and guaranteed distribution of in-magazine ads). But rather than see my subscription as a valuable association that should be preserved, the marketers seem to see it as a cash cow to be milked for everything they can. That's just insulting. And, I believe, illegal considering my demands to the contrary.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Jonny, they're all from me -- I looooove you! Why won't you return my emails?!?!?

Hmm... Because I don't need the loans, prescription drugs, and trouser enhancers that you're apparently trying to sell me several hundred times a day?



Edit: And I didn't know Boston was in Nigeria? Learn something every day, eh? Still, say hi to your mother for me, and I really hope you manage to get your late uncle's $3 million government back-pay / performance bonus to that Swiss bank you were talking about.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I don't understand people's hate of ads, in snail or e-mail. When did it get so hard not to read them, throw them away, or press delete?

Quite often, ads contain deals that you might actually benefit from. Without their existence, you might not even know there was a certain product available.

I would understand somewhat if one had gotten an ad for something totally unrelated, but this isn't the case with the op's statement.

First of all, a D&D chess set is completely unrelated to D&D. It's a chess set. It could be a Magical Trevor chess set or a Teletubbies chess set and it would have about as much to do with D&D as the D&D chess set.

Secondly, I'm quite certain that there are about forty billion products out there that someone wants to sell me that I can get along just fine without. Like cellular phones, or gold credit cards, or pewter wizard figurines. That I don't know about them is an excellent thing. If I have the need for something, I say to myself, "why don't they make this thing I need? Wait, maybe if I Google it..." and if it exists I can locate and purchase it. Like replacement blades for my Rolls Razor. Those are not advertised anywhere that I've ever seen, but I know where to order them from because I'm smart enough to use the intarwebs to find them. Marketers only need to advertise stuff that I don't want to buy, because if I want to buy it, I'll find it. Sending me card stock makes me less likely to buy whatever the hell it is they're trying to sell me, partly because I know that they're so desperate to sell whatever widget they're hawking that they're willing to spend thousands of dollars to mail the cards out. That tells me that they think the product won't move itself otherwise, which means that it's probably crap.

If the product were good enough to sell itself, all they'd have to do is put it up on the WotC website and the Dragon Magazine quarterly catalogue, and people would buy it. That's how it works with their books, because their books aren't just a bunch of crap. They are actually something I might want to buy. But I don't get info on the books from WotC's ads anyway. I know that every single book they publish will be advertised as the greatest thing since sliced bread. I get info and reviews from places like ENWorld, and use it to make informed decisions. Deciding to buy anything based on an advertisement is about the dumbest thing I can imagine myself doing. Ads aren't going to be honest about whether I will like the product. The marketers want me to buy stuff regardless of whether I actually want it. Ads are not to be trusted, and the appropriate response to ads is scepticism. In my case, I supplement scepticism with offense that they think I'm dumb enough to base my purchasing decision on an ad.