The debate about subscription paywalls around newspaper websites often seems quasi-religious. is the Great God Rupert right to want Sun punters to pay for everything? Do those heretics who still believe in free have all the best arguments? Ah! here, after four months of silence, comes Mr Murdoch's beloved Bun, at last giving us some facts to confirm the boss's prejudices.

Since August, when the wall went up, 117,000 readers have, one way or another, bought the Sun+ digital package, 47% of them signed up on mobile, 30% of them in the precious 25-to-34 age range. So everyone – though talking long marches – professes themselves content. Maybe, at £2 a week, the Bun could be drawing in £12m to £13m extra revenue that wasn't there last "free" July.

Nothing to sniff at here, then. But nothing too concrete to cover over either. Mr M wants "sustainable profitability" from his papers, according to Wapping leadership. That means hard sums of money, laid out for inspection. We know (more or less) what the Mail earns because the free Dacre Online details its ad revenues. The coy old Bun, though, pleads corporate-discretion-cum-bundling-obfuscation. Its super goals app cost more than £10m a year (with new social media teams and other investment costs on top). Hard targets are pretty hard to find.

Conclusion: the Sun shines, because they're saying something rather than nothing. But keep scanning, narrow-eyed. Last July, pre-wall, the print Bun sold an average 2,281,000 in the UK and Ireland. Last month that was 2,089,000. Holes in the bucket – and holes in the logic, too?