I think the descriptor is fairly accurate these are Dark, but not really outright dishonest. They do a lot to funnel you in, which I think is understandable but it was tougher to get past the huge red price that did say billed today, but not what the increased price would be. That and the cancellation.

When I was in my first year Econ 101 class I remember the professor telling a story which IIRC was about SF Bus Companies. We were talking about price elasticity and general market pricing mechanisms and doing price curves. The story was essentially that the bus company brought in consultants who evaluated why the company was losing money after it had raised rates. It was a no-brainer of course, that if you sell 5,000 rides a day (made up number) that if you raised prices from 1.00 to 1.10 you would make 10% more.

It turned out, that the company was doing rather poorly after raising rates but critically, they were even priced too high at 1.00. 20,000 people would ride the bus for $0.75 and have less impact on the marginal price as the busses were heavily underused.

The point is that it is possible, I would say likely but I have no data, that a subscription for the Boston Globe might attract 5,000 people at current price(made up number), but like above if they charged $0.99 a month, they could feasibly have 20000-200,000 customers in a biz with virtually 0 marginal cost, and profit tied directly to subscriber size(ads which I assume they show to even paying subscribers after reading the article).

Newspapers are super elastic, and that price curve probably falls steeply after $1.00 a month.