Why? I work at a newspaper, we've survived on ads for decades, the way we deliver them has just changed.
Most newspapers are like this, are you saying we should not exist?
Most newspapers are like this, are you saying we should not exist?
Still costs me around $2.50 for a Sunday issue locally.
I don't like ads, and I use an ad blocker (though with very permissive dynamic filtering rules), but we gotta pay the bills and pure subscription models rarely make sense.
Afaik, the only news agencies that work on subscriptions alone are the massive New York Times, which paywalls more than like 2 or 3 stories per user per week. Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters make most of their money from member papers that pay into them to get access to content they otherwise couldn't afford to make. Some publications sell specifically to niches, Bloomberg has a public facing website but most of their content is only available for consumption via the infamous Bloomberg Terminal, a very expensive dedicated workstation they develop in house so people who trade, say corn futures, can access extremely realtime information and reporting on hyper specific corn stuff.
All this is to say that selling subscriptions to the general public only works if you're the New York Times, and even then they still sell ads in print.
EDIT: hey look the times does have ads. They're pretty unobtrusive but they're there.
There isn't a way I can see around this problem short of abolishing the requirement to fund journalistic investigation and reporting and hosting.
- track my reading habits - were blinking trying to catch my attention - started played videos I didn't want to see
If a news website wants to make money off advertising, just host simple images on your own sever. No need to load stuff from shady companies which try to grab as much information as possible.
(And why the second category might die anyway, and ads just prolong their suffering)
Back in the day of paper newspapers, our subscription fees had to be augmented with ad revenue as well.
The same phenomenon is occurring with car dealerships facing Tesla.
There's also the philosophical argument, our mandate is to inform the public, how can we do that if we paywall everything? Not everyone can afford the paywall, and even if they could there's still the UX friction of handling payment.
The bottom line is we need to pay people to keep track of local government full time. It truly is a full time job. If we don't, who else will? In order to do this and allow concerned or interested citizens to share the things we learn on Facebook, ads make a lot more sense.