Pre-internet you could buy the Sunday edition of your city's newspaper for 50 cents. This included dozens of in-depth articles. So yea, probably on the order of a penny per article. Though it was heavily subsidized by car dealer advertisements and the classifieds.
Re:We’re dropping Google Ads
by dragonwriter on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @01:00AM
(#14094888)
It was pretty much completely paid by advertising; the purpose of charging readers is because paid circulation numbers is an important metric used by advertisers.
Yeah, thats pretty much it -- I remember print media too! Quality digital journalism from somewhere like NYT or WP (your opinions may vary) is worth $10/year/sub to me as an occasional reader. Unfortunately, they cost 10x that.
Thats at least an order of magnitude more expensive than its worth (to me), and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more than they would make from ads. As an ad-blocking user who reads a lot of online content, I am in favor in the pay for content model, but it has to come at an appropriate price. A couple cents per reading minute is the high end of what most news/magazine/blog type writing is worth to me.