Without wanting to guess at your financial circumstances, I don't think that the problem is not being able to afford subscriptions in most cases, it's that subs

Without wanting to guess at your financial circumstances, I don't think that the problem is not being able to afford subscriptions in most cases, it's that subscriptions are way more than the £0 people are used to paying, so they feel really expensive. The way I look at it is that the £5 I pay the Economist (for example) per week pays for the hundreds of hours of writing and editorial time (not to mention everything else) that enables this thing to be in front of me. If I didn't pay it, it couldn't exist, so I don't really see it as a choice. If I only read one article once in a while, I would feel differently, but I regularly read: The Economist, the New Statesman, The Grauniad, The FT Weekend, Nautilus and I just choose how to allocate my resources to support them (otherwise I don't really feel comfortable consuming their work without compensation). Yes, it cuts into other spending money, but one has to make a choice. I don't take coffee from a coffee shop every day without paying for it (also, compared to the price of a coffee in London, these subscriptions really aren't _that_ expensive). > if that's what the solution turns out to be – I'll go back to buying print media I mostly consume the print versions of these things anyway. > Is there no halfway house by which my browsing/consuming could be subsidized by responsible advertising thus increasing readership? I think a good halfway-house would be having a model like the one Brave was trying (I think) where you pay for content in small blocks every time you consume something. So when I read an article in my browser, a small amount of value is transferred, automatically, to the publisher. This is a model I like to an extent, but I think the problem is that you end up biasing things on popularity, rather than actual value (imagine how much money clickbait will make). Publications are really just bundles of contributors and topics, and paying for them as a bundle allows less popular (but still important and interesting) content to be created. This is one of the nice things about the BBC, the decreased commercial pressure allows them to make some really amazing programmes that no commercial house could, because everything is bundled into a single budget.