Average ad revenues per year per user for publisher is less than £0.50 according to industry reports. Wired are currently charging > 8x that per month for their subscription.
This is one of the problems with subscription models - for some reason publishers think it is sensible to charge literally hundreds of times the amount they would get per user per year for their subscription fees. £50 per year is not a sustainable model for subscription to online content (per site) it will fail and is down to sheer greed.
Publishers need to either start forming group subscription models where users gain access to many publications giving those publishers revenues which are inline with ad revenues if they want to replace ads with subscriptions - or - they need to reduce their subscription costs to micropayment levels inline with ad revenues.
But they do the opposite - they try to charge ridiculous subscription fees far far higher than the revenues they make per user from advertising and then guess what - they still throw advertising in as well - and wonder why subscription numbers are so low?
Then the go down another illegal route and start pushing "branded content" (aka native content or "advertorials"). I was at a publishing event in Paris just a week ago and they were talking about adblocking - their solution? Disguise advertising as content - again this is also illegal.
It beggars belief.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
