alt Hacker News>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version.
? Where is this true?
I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.
That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).
It is true in a historical sense.
People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.
This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).
On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.
For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.