Going away from ads is solely a business model question. Ads (and micro payments) allow services to collect value much closer to the actual utility curve of a u

Going away from ads is solely a business model question. Ads (and micro payments) allow services to collect value much closer to the actual utility curve of a user. The issue with other models, (like charging a flat fee - ie, 1$ per article) is that some people will not want to pay the full amount while others are willing to pay a lot more than the listed price. You lose out on both ends - you lose money you would have earned from the people who would pay $.50 or $1000 to access it. Ads allow the company to extract value out of the content closer to actual value of the content at scale. The hard part is finding a different business model that does that task better.