I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money, not via ads. Give me that option.
Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.
You often get a ecpm of 50 cents? That seems quite awful, even more so from the US. It should be closer to 10x that.
1) it’s based on page views where ads are rendered. So ad-blocked users aren’t in the denominator.
2) most of that revenue is driven by clicks, not ad views. So users like me, that rarely click on ads, ever, probably earn publishers about 50cents/cpm.
At the end of the day, if it cost them more than an ecpm of 0.50$ to produce that content (and I'm pretty sure it does, because most ad-based website never made ton of profit and that was the case even before adblocking became popular), than that just doesn't make sense either to have a price that low.
Subscriptions risk making silos. Once you have paid $5 for site-group-A (one million sites) it's annoying to find that the site you are reading belongs to site-group-B which belongs to some other subscription. This is the HBO-vs-Netflix problem.
Ad-blocking is a lot like using a DVR, or a VCR. Someone sends you data and you have the right to not view all of that data. The company has the right not to send you the data if you don't pay for it, but they don't have the right to tell you that you must view all of it.
Content that is funded by ads is often not content I particularly care about. If it matters enough people will be willing to fund it, if not, let it die.
You are definitely in a tiny minority if that's actually the case.