MIsses the elephant in the room:

nobody gives away their digital magazines to print magazine subscribers.

This blows my mind. The entire publishing industry feels entitled to charge subscribers twice for the same content and then act offended and worried when their subscribers tell them to pound sand. Of the magazines I get or have tried, all of them have a "digital edition" and all of them have no problem charging me an additional fee PER ISSUE to view the same ephemera through a janky web interface.

And nobody sees a problem with that.

Digital magazines are, at best, an imitation of print magazines. Unlike what the article says, the ads are all right there, front and center. Yeah, there's videos and stuff but it's all BTS "here's how we did that photoshoot" bullshit. None of it is content that stands on its own. And the entire publishing industry is somehow offended that they can't shake their customers down twice.

If they instead took a "Daily Show" approach where the online content was free to print subscribers and not only duplicated what was available in print, it augmented it, they'd get further along. Unfortunately digital magazines are a sad attempt to cash in twice on the same content.

Thus, they deserve to die.