No one is obligated to provide you with content on your terms, other than the government.
Where does that law / moral come from?
Until the industry adopts either microtransactions or federated publishing, I won't pay or sign up for most content. It's too inconvenient, and information is nearly infinite. You're just making the opportunity cost differential higher. I have better ways to spend my time.
And speaking to the advertising issue, I've never personally bought anything from an ad. They're annoying viruses being leveraged against my consciousness that I didn't consent to. That's bad enough without mentioning the tracking and deceptive practices they employ.
The whole economic model is a race to the bottom and is fucked. I'm sorry you're working in such a painful industry.
Look at what streaming did to the music industry. It's convenient. I pay monthly and have no ads. Do this please.
Interesting...
Spotify and the likes addressed a need in the market.
Advertising is still completely adequate method for compensating a lot of publishers.
Others, who don't mind giving the aggregators 30%, provide you with the ability to subscribe from Apple Newstand and similar services. There's been a bunch of services that tried to do content access like this... uptake was completely dismal.