> Ads ruin the reading experience, and subscriptions don't work at scale for all the sites you visit once or twice a month.

One thing to keep in mind that newspapers and other print media that have subscriptions also have ads. Subscriptions never covered all (or even most) of the costs of in the majority of publishing. One of the things subscriptions do do is require the subscriber to place a value on the content they're paying for (more than whatever piques their interest as they're browsing the web), which in turn puts pressure on the publisher to publish what keeps people paying for the content. This can make the per-view/per-click value of the publication higher. (There's also the issue of figuring out ways to be able to provide content that can't easily be redistributed elsewhere without authorization.) We haven't really gotten there on the internet yet.