Print ads don't call home with your identity when you see them, they don't tell a dozen different companies who you are. The magazine may have some general stat

Print ads don't call home with your identity when you see them, they don't tell a dozen different companies who you are. The magazine may have some general statistics on it's customers (maybe differentiated by region?), but they certainly don't give the advertiser enough information to uniquely identify every person who sees an ad, along with individual demographic information and information on what ads the reader has seen elsewhere. The print customer database is (probably, hopefully) not linked into other third party databases that list what your hobbies are, what shelves you look in at the store, and what other publications you subscribe to. If online news only had static first-party ads that were the same for every customer (or possibly every customer in X region), uninformed by Amazon/Google/other browsing, I'd be more than happy to turn off my ad blocker. If the newspapers produced a daily epub, I'd be happy to pay for it. Even then, epubs can contain references to third party images and other resources (not sure about PDF, I despise PDF for lack of text reflow). My personal ideal for online subscriptions would be an OPDS catalog that I could subscribe to; this supports login-based access, and I could use fbreader or any other app to read.