Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.
When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four stories a year?"
Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.
It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to bother following. Let alone subscribing.
I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple subscription levels.
That might buy the publisher (a) some credibility, and (b) an incentive to publish decent quality articles and not clickbait headed by misleading summaries.
Might some people abuse it? Sure. Probably. But I think that a large majority would not. Most of us do get it that people need to get paid.
Weeeell, some people do exactly that (and have done since the beginning of time, as popularized in folk songs). The iOS AppStore does that, and that's also "pennies". Amazon does that. It's no small part of their success.
It's a question of self-belief. A seller who is confident about the quality of his delivery will not mind guaranteeing refunds, because chances are that very few people will take him up on it. Considering your costs are pretty much the same whether you serve 10,000 or 1,000 webpages, it doesn't really matter if you get 9,995 or 995 refunds.
I guess, it's a bad analogy, as food that makes you sick is easier to discern than "shoddy article with no journalistic integrity"