Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero?
Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something), but will not pay for web sites. Third-party advertisers might pay, if you're lucky, and if you don't mind treating your users as a commodity, but the users themselves will not.
Subscriptions to web-based services don't count as paying for web sites?
Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.
If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.
Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.
Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?
I don't do that on the app store either.
And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?
I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.
There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.
Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.
Love to be able to pay for quality content.
Same with Spotify.
Both models are OK with me.
What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.
Not a great example.
In the end reality is that I just pass on buying subscriptions and would probably prefer buying subscriber access to a website if they made an app facade for the site that handled payment and login. The UX of web sites and subscriptions is that bad.
There's more to the Internet than websites. Believe it or not, there are lots of protocols out there, not just HTTP.