[kenhwang]

As someone who has worked with WSJ/NYT/LAT/Tribune on adtech in the past: that completely ad free subscription cost is significantly more expensive than you think.

Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.

Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.

Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.

When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.