They are desperate, all of media is desperate.
People want news online, and they do not want to see ads, they do not want to pay a subscription.
So if you are media company and want to stay afloat, you need to appeal to the people who are either willing (or don't know otherwise) to load ads or willing to pay a subscription. In both cases, it's in large part people on the fringe. Not your average person.
>they do not want to pay a subscription.
This is wrong in 2026. Lots of people want to pay. See: TFA
What they don't want is and _still_ see ads, get hassled by needy marketing emails. See: TFA
If you're saying "we're gonna show you ads and datamine you because you're getting it free", then when I do pay, you have to take that stuff out. Try to have your cake and eat it too = sub canceled, adblock on, ad nauseam enabled.
Conversion rates from user to subscriber are on the order of 5%. 5 people paying for every 100 people consuming is not sustainable.
It's also true that most people are unwilling to fully "buy out" their ad value. For instance Meta makes about $27/mo/user from instagram ads.
Would you pay $27/mo for instagram? Maybe people would pay $5, but Meta will still close the gap with $22 of ads...
Do you know how cheap it is to run a website?
NYTimes is probably spending less than $1-2,000,000/m to run their tech systems including the salaries of the tech people that keep it up and running. They made $2.82B in 2025, an increase of OVER 50% since 2020.
https://www.tickergate.com/stocks/nyt/revenue
Just shy of $2B of that money came from subscriptions alone, advertising was just over $500m of their income.
They're not hurting for money, and they're not bound to their advertisers.
I don't know why they can't offer an ad-free tier just for people who want the news and no bullshit.