If it wasn’t ads then what exactly was it? If free with ads was working, it would still be free.
You claim you can leverage that to other sales but it didn’t happen.
NYT is publicly traded. You can see their revenue, costs and everything. They made 2.5B in 1995 and 2.8B in 2025. Factoring inflation they have lost half their revenue. That means half the reporters lost their jobs.
Forcing people to pay like they used to pay for paper is working:
It worked for NYT because they already built a brand and had established customers. For others it failed. The model failed more than it succeeded aside from some special cases
They’re all switching back to providing content for free which would not happen if it failed. Only ones who can afford subscription model are ones that already established their brand and even then some failed
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If it wasn’t ads then what exactly was it? If free with ads was working, it would still be free.
You claim you can leverage that to other sales but it didn’t happen.
NYT is publicly traded. You can see their revenue, costs and everything. They made 2.5B in 1995 and 2.8B in 2025. Factoring inflation they have lost half their revenue. That means half the reporters lost their jobs.
Forcing people to pay like they used to pay for paper is working:
It worked for NYT because they already built a brand and had established customers. For others it failed. The model failed more than it succeeded aside from some special cases
Ads failed and subscriptions failed too so they went out of business. The free news model was tried for many years and failed.
Someone needs to pay the journalists’ salary.
They’re all switching back to providing content for free which would not happen if it failed. Only ones who can afford subscription model are ones that already established their brand and even then some failed