Charles Arthur at The Overspill on Wireds ad-free website for $1 a week1:
[Wired:] “For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.”
This presumes that adblocking readers will accept that they are worth $1/week to Wired, and that Wired is worth the same amount to adblocking readers. Is that proven? Given how small the amounts earned from ads per person are, this seems to be herding people who don’t know their true value towards a funnel. Premium ad display costs $10 per CPM – that is, per thousand showings. That’s 1c per premium ad you view. Multiply by the number of ads on a page – perhaps 10, for 10c? So if adblocking readers pay up but view fewer than 10 articles per week, Wired is making a solid profit from them, minus credit card costs.
$1 per week is far too high for this kind of value proposition. But here’s the rub: Can you imagine Wired management (or Condé Nast management more like it) approving a lower figure?
- His “permalinks” are a mess. ↩
