I think our content is worth $10, but of course we're a small paper, and very few people would pay $10 for it. If we paywalled our website, we'd just turn reade

I think our content is worth $10, but of course we're a small paper, and very few people would pay $10 for it. If we paywalled our website, we'd just turn readers away and it would go counter to our mandate to inform the public. I don't like ads, and I use an ad blocker (though with very permissive dynamic filtering rules), but we gotta pay the bills and pure subscription models rarely make sense. Afaik, the only news agencies that work on subscriptions alone are the massive New York Times, which paywalls more than like 2 or 3 stories per user per week. Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters make most of their money from member papers that pay into them to get access to content they otherwise couldn't afford to make. Some publications sell specifically to niches, Bloomberg has a public facing website but most of their content is only available for consumption via the infamous Bloomberg Terminal, a very expensive dedicated workstation they develop in house so people who trade, say corn futures, can access extremely realtime information and reporting on hyper specific corn stuff. All this is to say that selling subscriptions to the general public only works if you're the New York Times, and even then they still sell ads in print. EDIT: hey look the times does have ads. They're pretty unobtrusive but they're there.