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.

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.

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

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.

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.