Funny you mention adblocker. You'd think it's the biggest concern for publishers, but they're not scared of what they don't know. News publishers don't exactly

Funny you mention adblocker. You'd think it's the biggest concern for publishers, but they're not scared of what they don't know. News publishers don't exactly have nimble cutting edge engineering departments dedicated to min/maxing advertising revenue. Adblockers also block many general purpose analytics scripts that would inform the publisher that the adblocker is a threat. Very few publishers are willing to implement a hard paywall that could only be passed via confirmed payment. Especially when it relies on some 3rd party integration working. When there's a chance that that micropayment API doesn't work, no one thinks it's the payers fault, the blame always lies with the publisher in the user's eye, even when it's almost always the payer's fault. And there's nothing worse than pissing off a paying user. And hard paywalls require engineering investment, which newspapers tend to not have. It's practically effortless pushing static content up to a CDN with some ad serving scripts. It's a lot of work accepting micropayments on every request.