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@Alexander Hanff 1 "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."

And why is that? Because managing subscriptions requires extra resources and incurs extra cost. You've to sell to and support tens of hundreds of thousands of users, instead of just a few big clients, that you've to do with ad-supported model. This obviously requires a larger staff, which in turn requires more revenue/user to be sustainable.

"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."

That reason is called: economic rationality and covering the costs. Serving a subscriber costs more than serving an ad-supported user, so you've to charge more for a subscription, than what you make on an ad-supported user.

"Publishers need to either start forming group subscription models where users gain access to many publications"

Yeah. And newspapers need to start forming subscription models where users gain access to many newspapers. Or banks need to start forming subscription models where users gain access to many account with a single credit card. Etc. That's obviously not how things work.

"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."

Did it occur to you that they are already charging the bare minimum to cover their costs? Why do you assume they can lower their subscription fees? And why do you assume to know everything better than publishers do, while it's pretty obvious that you've neither the insight, nor the data, bot not even the wit to make those assumptions?

"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."

Yeah. You first force their hands by cutting their existing, honest forms of revenue with ad blocking. Then you're complaining that they have switched to other, less honest forms to generate revenue. Way to go. Hypocrisy much.