[VLM]

Paying subscribers have money and get complimentary copy. Non-paying subscribers get complimentary copy and garish advertisements as a punishment to encourage subscription. I'm not sure getting rid of the punishment ads is necessarily helpful to drive subscriptions. My understanding of the complimentary copy marketplace is its informal, "here's this nice news release of ours, now you wouldn't want us to pull our ad budget, would you, so you know what to do."

I'm not aware of any journalistic experiment where readers get to select between ads and complimentary copy. In theory it should be economically possible. Maybe even a slider bar where you can smoothly pick any ratio such as 20% ads and 80% complimentary copy? I'm pretty good at reading thru B.S. so I'd go complimentary copy, my elderly MiL needs help not getting ripped off so she's best pushing the slider to ads... of course putting my best interests in direct opposition to the advertisers isn't going to work well...