Bull. If that were true then companies that charge subscriptions would never go out of business. Also as Teej said, his examples are horrible. Zynga is not a subscription business by any means. Apparently he is not aware that charging for products does not equal being a subscription model business.
I'm talking about passive income. Every virtual good Zynga creates needs to be made one time and then can be sold many times. It's passive in that sense.
I used subscription models as one example, because I'm most familiar with that, but selling virtual goods and selling themes are also ways of making passive income.
It turns out that high LTV is correlated closely with high customer acquisition cost. That means getting people to convert to your service is -hard-. I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the "disadvantages" part.
I also think it's silly to write an article on subscriptions as a business model and then mention examples that don't use subscriptions at all.
I think he might have just gone with subscriptions in his examples because it's the best understood way to make money online since it's obvious who is getting paid and when. This is in contrast to ad-based, virtual-goods, or skimming off transactions.
The article as a whole was a bit short, generalized and simplistic for my liking.
I am trying something very similar in GPS tracking space
