Hoo-ray! It's refreshing to see an honest online business model for a change: "you pay us money, we write stuff for you." It's also interesting to see what they think you're worth in ads and tracking: $2-3 a month. I hope they succeed.
I'm entirely in favour of supporting this approach. And Ars is one of the few sites which I read enough of to justify the price. (Which is only about $2/month)
A few years ago I would have thought Ars was worth it, but it has since slipped below the “worth my time” threshold, aka “not even for free.” I’m glad that they finally realized a significant portion of their audience use script and ad blockers, often with a VPN; that’s something at least.
They unfortunately publish a lot of useless filler nowadays, but it's pretty easy to skip past that, and they still seem to do real journalism on a regular basis. Are they really worth less than $0?
They do very little that want previously covered by other, better sources. As a bonus, I don’t have to sift through a mess for that information. Sadly, Ars has mostly become a sort of digest for tech/science. So for me, they’re not worth the time, never mind the money.