Zune Thoughts: The Status of Subscriber Services Across Thoughts Media Sites

Some of you have been wondering about subscriber services, so I wanted to give you an update on them. By early next week we hope to have the email blasts and the advertising toggle available to subscribers. When they're ready to go, I'll make an announcement about it and tell you how to configure them. Our old control panel was far too complex (I had a good chuckle when I saw how convoluted we made it), so the new one will be fast and simple to use.

Regarding the actual subscriptions themselves: priority #1 is getting the services set up for current subscribers. When we get the subscription sign-up set up again, you'll be able to renew and sign up again (and in reality, they're the same thing). When we get to this stage, something cool will happen: you won't be signing up for a Pocket PC Thoughts Subscription (or whatever other site you're reading this on), you'll be signing up for a Thoughts Media Subscription, meaning the benefits will track across all of our sites. We'll build something into our system to allow some granularity, such as being able to get email blasts for some, but not all, sites. I'm not sure if we'll have that ready to go right off the bat, but we'll certainly try.

Lastly, once we have a working, unified subscriber system, I'm going to really ramp up the value of the subscriber benefits (and I'll likely be looking for help from the community to do so). We started out strong then, frankly, got a little feeble and didn't aggressively pursue new discounts and benefits for subscribers. I want to make the Thoughts Media Subscription something really worth the money you spend on it.

And there you have it - thanks for your patience as we work to get all the pieces together.