Newspapers were never free of ads even with subscripts. Ads subsidized your subscription. $0.25 for a full news paper and $1.50 for the bigger sunday addition is never going to pay for everything on its own (assuming a subscription actually lowered the full rate).

The only thing that I recall that was ever advertised as free from ads with a subscription was premium cable like HBO. Even magazines were full of ads. Hell, certain magazines were bought more for the ads than the content (thinking fashion mags).

Back when newspapers involved paper, providing an ad-free experience for people that subscribe would have been extremely expensive: A very large part of a newspaper's footprint was actually setting the paper into pages in a sensible fashion, printing and distribution. Printing an extra copy of the paper that has no ads would have been quite expensive, regardless of advertiser revenue.

Today, it'd be quite simple, as most ad blockers prove every day. I'd argue that today, many small newspaper websites are virtually unreadable without an ad blocker. 2-3 videos playing all at once, plus regular banner ads, while trying to make close buttons invisible. The same number of ads appear in a mobile browser too, leaading to basically no space to read any of the actual content.

I'm not buying your premise. You seem to be implying that the cost of running the paper could have been sustained by subscription only foregoing any ad sales. I'm saying the exact opposite in that even if 100,000 people paid full price for the paper every day, that would not raise enough money to run the paper. This is why it is said subscriptions were subsidized by the ads. To eliminate ads, the subscription price would have to increase significantly beyond what people would accept.

You seem to only be coming from the expense of layout which is just not true. The world has increased in size from only paying attention to the local news with maybe a few specialty sources. Now, you can have access to news from any country at any time. Expecting people to pay for subscriptions to that is not realistic either. So since people are not paying for subscriptions, each company is depending on income for other places which has always been ads. The key difference today for me is that ads can now be malicious beyond their original purpose. Seeing an ad in print or tv or hearing one on the radio was never able to drain you of resources whether that be compute power or something much more nefarious. Because they cannot (or will not) control that, they have lost all sympathy from me about ads.

Because nothing is ever enough. You were already enough of a sucker to pay for one thing, why shouldn’t you be suckered into paying a little more?

Because if you have the disposable income to pay to block ads, your attention is absolutely tantalizing to an advertiser.

Because their subscription revenue does not cover their cost of business and/or revenue goals.

They're free to provide a tier that does cover costs and provide profit, why don't they do that?

As someone who has worked with WSJ/NYT/LAT/Tribune on adtech in the past: that completely ad free subscription cost is significantly more expensive than you think.

Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.

Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.

Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.

When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.

The usual reason is people who are willing to pay to avoid ads are also the most valuable people for advertisers to advertise to. That decreases the value of their advertising business, which means they have to push the subscription prices up even further, which may make the business unviable. Especially because they have to compete with other businesses that will happily copy their content and put ads on it with no paywall.

I know this isn't exactly the same, but I used to work at an adtech startup and my boss was very savvy in the industry, and right in front of me did some quick napkin math showing that Hulu probably makes about $20 a month off of people in the free tier, and only $13 from their ad-free* subscription.

So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.

The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?

*Their "ad-free" tier has ads.