I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor until it got shutdown.
The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.
The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.
Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues. Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction prefered by their owners. In the US, most small towns have newspapers owned by the leading families. The paper is valuable to that family if it's being read by the locals and the paper making money is nice but secondary.
My own town (60,000+) lost its paper more than ten years ago.
Was that not the general experience?
That said, my small town's paper is going strong - it serves two cities of 12,000 and 3,000 people in a county of a little less than 100K.
GOOD content, though, is expensive to make, and while the creators would absolutely love it if everyone read it, their primary need is the ability to keep producing it. There are fewer billionaires paying to keep them in business, and if there were, they'd mostly likely start falling into being the bad kind of content.
So you end up in this situation where all of the true, high qualify information is behind paywalls, and all the bullshit propaganda masquerading as information is freely available to all.