For a site like Wired and many other established publishers this doesn't make any financial sense. There's still a lot of money to be made from plain old ads, as annoying as they may be to most of us. It's obvious by now that one way or the other ads are going the way of the dodo but it's difficult to think what will replace them or if that replacement will leave us better off. The way I see it, in the not so distant future all these publishers will be paywalled and we may have to resort to 'article pirates' in order to read them because I'm not about to pay 60 different $4/month subscriptions for the eventual article posted on one of the aggregation platforms I frequent. I really don't browse most of these sites, which is what would justify the $4/month, in theory anyways.
You will read more there, but you're also going to be more likely to leave if you start seeing articles posted elsewhere that you are paywalled out of. It's likely that most people are interested in certain writers and not certain mastheads. It's very similar to music.
