If you go back to 2006, the pay-per-view fees are literally only a couple of hundred dollars; this really threw me, until I discovered they only introduced it at the turn of 2007!

The only explicit comment on use numbers I’ve noticed so far was in a followup post to the above, which estimated 6,500 for the first half of 2007; if that rate held up through the rest of the year, it’d be equivalent to an average of ten dollars an article.

ETA: by October 2007 “almost 17k” was being quoted. Extending that out to the end of the year gives us maybe 20k – assuming the revenue figures are accurate, that suggests the average fee paid was as low as $6.50 per article. That’s much lower than expected, which suggests either that people only pay for the cheap stuff, or that the financial reports aren’t quite telling us what we think they are.

(These sections are a bit cryptic. I never did quite figure out what the “publishers fee” income was, either… but as it’s still a six-fiugre sum in 2006, it can’t be directly correlated here.)