If you look at many subscription-based businesses (newspapers, cable providers, mobile voice/data companies), you'll often see businesses where the cost of acqu

If you look at many subscription-based businesses (newspapers, cable providers, mobile voice/data companies), you'll often see businesses where the cost of acquisition is pretty low compared to the life-time value of a customer. Newspapers (pre-Web) are a particularly good example of this - most of their costs were in production/distribution. Acquiring a customer was relatively cheap and churn relatively low. So anecdotally, there are historical business models that feature low acquisition costs & low churn.