There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. I've no idea what it was, or is now, but it's about a million times more than the cost of me reading every new story on the NY Times website today. Maybe not a million times, but it's certainly much higher.

So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of the newspaper (and printers and delivery people and so on). In theory the cost of how I read "the paper" now should be much lower, so if I pay to subscribe to the website maybe there shouldn't be ANY ads? Or far fewer?

I guess my thinking is nytimes.com isn't the same thing as The NY Times I get delivered to my house, so maybe things like ads should be treated in a different way? Sure the people that make it and reporters and news and all that are the same, but how I consume the actual thing is significantly different and has a different cost model.

Plus those print ads were/are WAY different in so many ways.

It still costs a lot of money to send reporters all over the world and do lengthy investigative journalism, regardless of if it is delivered to you in print or digital format. And NYT does charge more for physical paper delivery than they do for online-only subscriptions.

Home delivery NY Times is more than 2x the cost of digital (dependent on location), you're already getting the "no paper" discount by buying digital.

> So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of the newspaper

Distribution costs went down, but so did ad revenue.

It used to be that a subscription primarily paid for the cost of printing/distribution, and the real profit came from advertising. Unfortunately, print ads use to pay significantly more than web ads do today. So while the distribution costs are lower, most newspapers now need both revenue sources.

> There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me.

There is also a higher cost to the subscriber to receive a newspaper compared to digital delivery, IIRC. So it is still proportional.

Print ads are so much better than online ads though. - Print ads generally don't break reading lines as most of them are generally between articles or between pages - Print ads don't move.

There are multiple moving ads in between paras of a long form online articles which is a much worse experience than reading the same article in print.

Unfortunately, what has been true since the beginning of newspaper time changes in the digital era, as every newspaper has learned painfully.

If too many users don't expect to see ads once they subscribe, then it doesn't matter what the cost model is; NYT has to adapt to the market's demands, change their costs, or shut down.

They could have multiple tiers.

1) Free = 10 articles per month 2) Basic subscription = Unlimited articles, with ads 3) Premier subscription = Unlimited articles and no ads.

Existence of Tier 3 reduces Tier 2's value more than money taken from Tier 3.

NYT's sales pitch to advertisers is access to the intellectual/monetary elite. Saying "here, you can access only the less spendy ones" isn't going to be good.

I find it a little funny that you're picking on NYT for that one. They were one of the first to offer digital-only subscriptions and their numbers have been climbing steadily since around 2011 when the introduced their metered paywall.

https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...

It's not that users don't expect to see ads that revenue is down. It's that the ad-sell business has been effectively taken over by a few large actors who promise all kinds of growth because of their targeted/tracking ad networks.

And presently ad revenue is down even further because many businesses first spending cuts were in advertising for Q2/Q3 since they aren't operating anyway. That said, this last point is only speaking from my own present industry experience.

> This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time.

Newspaper journalism has been a joke the entire time too, so it’s not clear what your point is. The NyTimes is a shining example of how having two sets of customers to please lowers the quality of reported news.

> This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time.

This article posted yesterday about cascading collapses seems relevant: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-c...

Business models that used to work well can collapse in a hurry.

A well-known German magazine offers an ad-free experience for 2€. Several newspapers have similar offers.

So actually it's peanuts, not 50% more.

They should be self hosting ads just like print. If they were smart 20 years ago they could have become Doubleclick.

When Doubleclick emerged they were essentially self hosting ads.

Back then the digital vision wasn't in those media centres. They got online quickly, but they were not operating active engineering departments. Their industry was news. Advertising was a supplement, not the primary business. Hindsight is 20/20, for sure, though.

I think this is a good move by NYT. I only wish the companies I've been associated with had the kind of resources to do the same. But it's expensive to even start something like that. For many companies in the space the resources are already spread thin.

It would be unblockable too if they just had them as static images in the page. Unless you spent hours tailoring your filters and engaging in an arms race with the sysadmin, you wouldn't ever be able to win and correctly call an image an image and an ad an ad.

How do I know they aren't just proxying the request through their servers? It's third party but just transparently loaded through the same server as the rest of the content.

They were not interested in providing an ad-free option as of ~1 year ago, I asked.