95 is more than 22

A while back we changed one of our advertising offerings from $22/week to $95/month.

This change saved us some non-trivial time and effort in invoicing and processing payments. Most of the advertisers affected were running the ad for months or years at a time anyway.

When it was time for a longtime advertiser using that particular offering to renew, they said they wouldn’t because it was “getting too expensive.”

We tried to explain:

22 * 52 = 1,144

95 * 12 = 1,140

We had also started offering a “buy 11, get 1 month free” incentive, so:

95 * 11 = 1,045

But 95 is larger than 22 and people are sensitive to basic number comparisons, sometimes without regard for the full context.