Magazine Subscriber File Under Fire
A new magazine subscriber list has drawn the fire of both publishers and list professionals.
The Magazine Subscribers of America (MSA) masterfile offers 1.6 million subscription buyers, selectable by magazine title, for $90 per thousand names. It is comprised of buyers who have purchased one or more magazine subscriptions.
But at least one publisher said in e-mail to DIRECT Newsline that MSA, a subscription subagent, is offering magazine selects without the consent of the publishers. And Ryan Lake, CEO of the Lake Group, challenged the files legitimacy in a June 6 e-mail to clients.
Dan Davis, the president of MSA, said in an interview that he owns the names and will continue marketing them.
Sources said that an unwritten standard exists in the publishing industry that agents, and thus subagents, do not own the names of subscribers they capture for publishers and therefore cannot rent those names. “The industry standard is that we own our own names,” said one source.
When the data card describing the file was first distributed earlier this month by MSA, Lake wrote that the list may be tied to Publishers Services Exchange (PSE), a Washington-based company that is being sued by the state of Oregon over its subscription marketing practices.
Davis denied any connection to PSE. He told DIRECT Newsline that the file is comprised of subscribers to more than 900 magazines that his 17 year-old firm has sold through direct mail and telemarketing. A number of segments of subscribers have already been marketed by MSA and the new list represents a compilation of all subscribers, he said.
A lawyer for PSE, Alan Herson, also denied PSE had any involvement in the subscriber list. “They must have gotten our name mixed up with somebody else,” he said.
On June 18, Lake sent out a second e-mail updating his June 6 message. It said that he had spoken to Davis who stated that MSA was “in no way linked or connected to” PSE. Lake continued that he advised Davis that publishers would likely sue his firm over the subscriber information he was marketing and that Davis defended the practice of renting subscriber names saying the names “belong to him.
