Wired kind of agrees: if you subscribe to the print edition (~12/yr IIRC), you get access to the digital editions too.

The $1/week is a ridiculous grab from people who are unaware that there is a cheaper option available.

Wired is one of those mags you can easily get a subscription for under $5. Free subs used to be pretty common too. My current subscription goes till something like 2024 due to stacking a bunch of free or cheap subscriptions together. $1/week makes no sense.

Yep: https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/

Something squirrelly in the pricing tiers.

Indeed. You can subscribe to digital-only Wired for $19.99 anywhere in the world, and in the US it includes a print copy too.

I'd consider a $1/week if it covered all Conde Nast publications, or a significant portion of the internet. By that logic, though, I'd prefer if a subscription to Texture (Next Issue) or other content services included free access to the affiliated websites without ads. It adds up quick, but even the weekly version works out to $3.46/week for basically every magazine I'd care to read...

Of course ... I'm just saying this. I actually don't read magazines. But I'd pay for a subscription, especially if I could share it with family.

Those are probably subsidised by ad revenue.

I'd prefer to pay, say, $10/mo for _all_ the content I read, and that's basically the very upper bound. I figure $120/yr is a much better deal than what they (where by "they" I mean all the news sources I read) are getting from ads right now. I don't click on ads, and brand advertisements don't pay shit.

Texture is an attempt to be that. Like Netflix they don't have everything you could ever want. But they have enough.

I am most likely to see a wired article by following a HN link. That texture has some other article that is similar is totally pointless, as it is either the wired article or nothing.

Don't get me wrong, texture is probably doing great things, but until we get copyright changed to include a right to stream any work (subject to payment), such collections will be mostly pointless.

But the question is: are those magazines themselves stripped of all ads? Or do I pay for the magazines, and then find out they're 50% ads?

Perhaps something like Google Contributor.

It's completely unlike Google Contributor. Google Contributor keeps Google in the loop and only removes _Google_ ads if you win an auction. All other ads keep shitting all over your page. This would let you disable _all_ ads, yet still pay the publisher.

How do you propose to do this?

Fixed buffet-style fee would be difficult. Per-page micropayments, however, could be accomplished with some form of blockchain (probably not Bitcoin though, it's collapsing under its own weight as it is), perhaps with an extra layer of anonymization to get rid of tracking. The problem with micropayments is greed: publishers think their content is worth vastly more than it really is.

If I knew how to do buffet-style scheme for this without involving things like carrier billing and DNS tracking, I'd be working on my own startup RFN. This could undo the likes of Google and FB and make the web a much better, and much more private place.