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.