This fact is why newspapers are dead, and online content continues to blossom. In the information age, there's absolutely no excuse for the content they produce to cost $1500/year per subscription.

In fact, that's where we hit the real problem: the kind of content that is covered with advertisements is usually not very good content to begin with.

This is especially true of content aggregators and meta sites such as Reddit and to some extent, this website. The content isn't even theirs: they are simply hosting a discussion forum about the content. A new-agey one instead of the old BB sites, but it's nonetheless exactly the same.

What content providers should be learning is that people are willing to pay for good content. Quality absolutely matters. The 90s and 00s were all about quantity, but now we're up to the rafters with disposable content. Look at the shows with the best ratings today: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Exceptional content quality, heavily pirated because the content creators have failed to adapt to new media distribution. The fact that I can torrent GoT more easily than I can view it from HBO is tragic.

So there's your dose of education for the day.