The newspapers and magazines have had advertisements for at least the last two centuries to help subsidize the cost of the subscription. If you had to pay full price for a subscription, you probably wouldn't have it because the publisher couldn't afford it.

And likely even if you paid for a subscription to a magazine, your name and address was sold to marketers to sell you direct mail. And this ended up in someone's database, who resold it to advertisers time and time again.

Cook's Illustrated is an example of a magazine that doesn't sell ads. But the cost per issue is higher and the number of pages is lower. Also most of the magazine is usually printed in black and white to save publishing costs.

The question I ask myself constantly, is do I want to end up being advertised to (Google, Facebook), or do I want to end up being part of someone's brand (Apple, Nike)?

One model, in the UK at least, is to use an agent for purchasing of subscription publications.

This newsagent delivered the papers and magazines to your door before you left for work in the morning, didn't send your data to organisations and allowed flexible purchasing options (monthly, weekly, etc). Many people still use news agents for their subscription delivery mechanisms.

Perhaps we can see an online agent, where we pay a trusted third party that negotiates transactions on all our online activites on our behalf, and protects our privacy, location, when else we buy, etc. That digital agent would collect a small (1% of transaction cost) as fee, to continue it's operations.