[pg]

Good heavens. Maybe this is why they don't seem to care that their subscriber-only articles are invisible to the rest of the world. I thought they were just backward, but maybe the WSJ is in effect a luxury product.

Come to think of it, though, those numbers could as easily imply that their average reader is very old. So maybe they are backward.

[far33d]

Note that they use "average" instead of median.

I'm sure more super-rich people read it than super-poor people, so this average is a bit aliased.

[pg]

Good point. If Bill Gates subscribes, he alone adds about $33k to the average net worth of their 1.7 million print subscribers.

[epi0Bauqu]

I very much doubt a census was taken. The page says the source is from a "2007 WSJ Subscriber Study." It is very doubtful Bill Gates was part of this study. In all likelihood, they polled a relatively small random sample and the median was pretty close to the average.

[brett]

An NPR story I heard the other day brought up a related factor in their stubbornness to go free: unlike most other newspaper subscriptions, most WSJ subscriptions either get paid for by an employer or are written off.