I subscribed to WS for many, many years, right from the good old days when they had the small newspaper format. I finally realized (anout 10 years ago) that it had morphed into another of Marvin's lifestyle mags and had little relevance to anything serious about wine, bar a couple of reviewers, and I decided that they weren't worth continuing a subscription just to read them. I haven't seen anything to make me revise my assessment and I pay absolutely no attention to their ratings or anything else they say these days.
I'll allow as how it might be a nice magazine for the waiting room table, but that's about it.
As for the old debate about correlation between advertising and ratings, I'm with David. In the absence of evidence, best not to be a rumour monger.
BTW, I was tossing out some old mags a month ago and looked at the old newspaper WS. They used to really hammer wines in their ratings. Instead of the endless march of 90 pointers, there were a ton of ratings below 80!