The problem with that statement is how incredibly hard it will be to follow up on it. Marvel can produce all the Spider-Man issues they want, but they're still not as profitable since the One More Day debacle. If they want to get their readership back without undoing OMD/BND, they're going to have to do some quality writing...which is difficult considering how often both titles are realeased. Then again, we have the example of 52...
Really? I think the quality's fluctuated a lot, but there's been a number of good to great stories, and that ratio has only picked up as the title spins into the Gauntlet. As for numbers, I understood that the numbers were actually pretty good.
(According to the sales figures, it's dropped off in sales 25.9% in the past year and 31.7% in five years. But you have to keep in mind that it's shipping tri-monthly. I guess to really get a good feel for it, you'd have to find the sales for the cumulative Spider-Man sales of one year or five years ago and figure out the mean. I'd imagine when there were three separate Spidey titles, the others didn't sell nearly as well as ASM, which means you need to compare ASM at present to the whole Spidey line pre-OMD/BND. But by the same token, the drop-off in sales for other marquis Marvel titles seem to have hit a similar decline, which means that ASM seems to be holding steady with other big name books despite the fact that it ships thrice monthly)
Incidentally, while November sales show sale by unit (for all Marvel titles, not just Spidey) are down by 8% in the last ten years (4 in the past five), dollar sales are up by 23 (16). Is ASM at the 3.99 or 2.99 price point?