I tend to think that the low takeup suggests that we already overprice some of these news services. Some also seem to be oddly priced for marketing reasons (for example, to make the print paper look like a good deal to potential online-only customers).

But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.

Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.

And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.

So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".