There's two effects that can happen when you split revenue between ad and paid subscription. Firstly, if you don't have enough value-add for subscribers, you m

There's two effects that can happen when you split revenue between ad and paid subscription. Firstly, if you don't have enough value-add for subscribers, you make the ad version worse to artificially increase the perceived value of the subscription. Secondly, because your most valuable eyeballs are not viewing ads anymore, the value of your ad space goes down. To make up the loss, you have to increase the amount of ad space. I think keeping pagination for ad supported viewers is definitely a result of the first effect. It's difficult to tell if the second effect is in play here, or if the value of the ad space was low enough beforehand to require pagination to make up the cost.