https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...
Hsbc demanded The Telegraph pull negative stories or they would pull their advertising.
All newspapers are full of stories about property "investment" and have a separate segment one a week for paid advertising of property.
Subscriptions for the “modern newspaper” did not pay the bills, but were proof that people were actually reading the newspaper.
Prior to that there were papers which did indeed make their money from subscriptions. But their content was different as well: explicitly ideological and argumentative. The NYT or Wapo idea of neutral journalism was a later development.
According to this, the newspaper subscription only covered about 18%. The rest was from advertising.
Historically, at least, they sold subscriptions.