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> It's just weird that I have a better experience if I don't pay than if I do.

not if you look from the POV of an advertiser.

If you don't pay, chances are you would not have money to spend on goods being advertised. But if you are rich enough to afford to be a subscriber, chances are you'd be rich enough to buy those goods being advertised!

Therefore, a subscriber is a much more valuable advertising target, which means the guardian can sell you for a higher price than a free user. Given limited real-estate and resources, they'd target a higher value person than a low value person to send the spam.

This is something I always assumed but thought was cynical. But it's true. Willing to pay for no ads? High value ad target.

Understood but I hate ads a lot more than I care about the sustainability of websites I use so that tends to disincentivise me from subscribing.

I've been subscribed to the Guardian for a while and I think that's a bit harsh - yes they offer the cooking app (which I looked at and I don't use) but apart from that the contact from them has been perfectly reasonable?

I think the rest of the comms was triggered by me just signing up. But I would deem that negative, I didn't sign up because I wanted to personalise or deepen my interaction, just to send some cash their way.

For example: On the guardian website when I created my account it defaulted me to on for sending me communications my post, phone and SMS about their products and services and for marketing research. I find that unacceptable.

They offer an "Unsubscribe from all email" button but this is only available in their online settings, if you click on an unwanted email and unsubscribe there, the above settings remain on.

And it was just an example. It's just every time I sign up for something it's not just that, I also have to unsubscribe for a bunch of mailing lists and surveys I never asked for. And go through all the privacy settings and turn off all the crap where they use my information. Sometimes even periodically like on LinkedIn where they keep adding new settings that default to on.

To be fair I did find their subscription process a bit confusing - I think I actually managed to subscribe twice at one point. But since I got that all sorted out I think it's been fine - I mostly use the mobile app (no notifications) and the main website via a desktop browser. I checked my gmail account and I get an email from them on average every 2 or 3 days which is fine as they often do alert me to stuff I am particularly interested in.

I had a similar experience with the Providence Journal Bulletin some years back.

I subscribed out of a general desire to support good journalism, but it did nothing to reduce the deluge of online ads.

I can't entirely fault them though. They might not have had enough market info at the time to justify making a reduced-ads variant of their website for subscribers.

> But they started spamming my mailbox immediately with stupid stuff like cooking apps. And they ask all sorts of stuff about my interests

Weird, I also subscribed and got nothing like that. Are you sure you're not reading it wrong/subscribed via a rentseeking third party?

Long-form news outlets (ie, weekly/monthly/quarterly release) tend to not fall into that scummy, data-mining behaviour the daily news outlets do from my experience. Subscribe to something like the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), the Atlantic, or Delayed Gratification instead. They tend to hire well reasoning journalists that do research with due dilligence.