Redbox Raises Rental Prices & Unthink: New Anti-Facebook Social Network
Redbox Raises Rental Prices
Redbox’s DVD rental kiosks have grown in popularity lately, attracting customers fed up with Netflix’s video subscription service. Now Redbox is risking its own customer backlash by raising prices, the same move that triggered Netflix’s recent loss of 800,000 U.S. subscribers.
Yesterday, Redbox announced a 20 percent price increase, making the rental rate $1.20 per day, instead of the current $1 daily rate. Redbox prices will remained unchanged for Blu-ray discs at $1.50 per day and video games at $2 per day. Redbox tested the price increases in several cities over the past year, and concluded that a 20% price increase would not drastically affect DVD rentals.
In order to maintain customer loyalty, Redbox must continue to offer transparency and honesty in all of their business changes.
New Anti-Facebook Social Network Launches
A newly launched social network Unthink, nick-named the “anti-Facebook,” aims to emancipate social media and give users complete control over their personal data. The new site, unthink.com, allowed users to register for a beta version yesterday.
They also release a promotional video criticizes other social networks like Facebook and Google+ for “spying” on users and selling too many ads. Unthink makes all user data private by default. Users may then allow others to see the information they want public, and keep private anything they want private.
Additionally, Unthink will never sell user data to companies. Instead, users can choose to have specific brands “sponsor” their pages. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, Unthink received heavy traffic from all over the world. The stream of traffic shows that many users are interested in an alternative to Facebook, which we saw before with Google+.
