[saimiam]

Print has a natural limit - you cannot expect to print and deliver unlimited sheets interspersed with ads. Websites can show you content from a decade ago with ads thrown in if the content is relevant to you. Print ads can be skipped far more easily that web ads.

With NYT and WaPo, your subscription is supposed to support quality journalism. The tradeoff that you're agreeing to - pay but also see ads - is not going to work for say a music subscription service or a stock tips service. My argument holds for those businesses. I'd say that WaPo, WSJ, and NYT are outliers, not the mainstream.

Tasteful ads:

Web advertising is so democratic that even the smallest company or startup can spend a few hundred dollars and get in front of you. Demanding tastefulness from such advertisers puts us as the risk of "corporatising" ads again, imho.

Anyway, I don't want to commandeer this conversation. I'd love to hear other opinions from HN.