Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
30% of the price a consumer would have paid in the traditional model. In all probability even accounting for costs this represented a huge increase in profit per unit sold for the band itself.
That seems lower than one might hope for as a content producer but maybe higher than an average consumer might want to pay as per month - about the right number? It makes sense that as the market approaches perfect competition (no barriers to entry, no information inequalities, no transport costs) it gets pretty hard to make abnormal returns - supply just ramps up until there is less per head.
This could be a nice channel for incentivising content that doesn't work well with an advertising model, for example RSS feeds. It'll be interesting to see whether they can market this well enough though.
Hopefully, the premium-based-monetization services would make more money and expand faster than those with the free model.
Part of that is that I spend 12-15 hours a day on my computer for my job and side projects... being able to go outside and read my news on paper is a welcome break from that.
But the other part is that I find the reporting to be of generally high quality and depth. I think the print media that is hurt the most by the Internet are those with shorter stories and lots of ads in between. The Internet does this bite-sized content extremely well, so traditional media will have a hard time competing, but there is still demand for longer, in depth content, which is (so far) best supplied by paid reporters.
Ideally, I would get all news/articles relevant to me within 10 minutes and this would probably save me 50 minutes every day. Personally, I would pay if the service if saved me a significant amount of time and had the absence of articles of which I was not interested.